Since ’96 I lost at least a few hours a day with spending time online. Besides making websites and playing games online there was not much interesting for me on the web. This all changed when I left the internet for the printed media; ironically I was only reading things about the internet. In 2002 I became a student new media at the university of Amsterdam. With this new license for spending too much time on the web, I was back on the web.
Soon I began to become interested in network theories, social media, information architecture, taxonomies and last but not least; data-visualizations. Writing about the internet seemed the next reasonable thing to do and blogging seemed to be the coolest thing to do. After writing my first post for Spotlight Effect I realized exactly how awesome blogging was and became friends with all the other, very passionate, editors of Spotlight Effect. A few months later we won a ‘Dutchbloggie’-award for being the best marketing weblog of The Netherlands.
I started writing for WebWereld and contributing guest posts for other blogs. Blogging is great, you get to go to a lot of good parties and you meet a lot of other interesting, smart people who are very passionate about what they are doing. But the meet-ups and parties began to have a bad taste. I felt that I was becoming a social parasite: always the guest, never the host. Three months ago Ernst-Jan Pfauth and myself came up with the idea to organize a blogging conference. Supported by Meganova we will host BLOG08 at the end of October. Since a month or so I’m also pitching an idea for a (really awesome) mobile application called ‘MapTheGap, we are in the last rounds of getting funding.