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Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Live blog advertizing with Twitter, Flickr and Flash

07 Apr 2008

A great idea from Adhese’s blog ad network Enchanté and Caroline from Rolling Talks: send blogger Ine on a skiing vacation to Club Med in Chamonix, and while she liveblogs using Twitter and Flickr, show her tweets and flicks live in ads for Club Med.

Club Med campaign by Adhese
Club Med campaign by Adhese
Club Med campaign by Adhese

The ads are displayed this week on blogs like BVLG, Bnox, Past is Prologue and others. You can read more about this campaign on the Adhese blog.

 

A Round Of Link Love

21 May 2007

The following people have requested or deserved link love, and so I’ll post them here and add them to the favorites page. Thanks for doing whatever you did, and good luck with what you’ve started!

Thanks for reading and blogging!

 

Blog Sticks

19 Dec 2006

So, thank you Maarten, Robin, Geert and Randy for throwing me the blog sticks. I think I have enough to start a campfire by now :) Apparently you guys are very interested in those 5 things about me. So, just to satisfy in your tabloid needs, here are the 5 facts about me you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask when we were chatting.

  1. My graduation paper that got awarded with a ‘bachelor award of excellence’ in Flanders was actually written in 3 hours because I had forgotten the due date and was only remembered of it because a fellow student had changed his nickname on MSN into ‘f*cking paper, I hate you’. So I asked him what was up and he said he had been working on it all night because it was due at 1 PM. At that time it was 11 AM. I handed in mine at 3 PM (had to take the train to school etc) – The paper was supposed to be around 20 pages and I had to put in over 10 pages worth of screenshots to make it. And still people thought it was good. Hah.
  2. When I was still young and innocent, I’ve been an altar boy for several years in the church in my street, until the priest caught me eating all the Hosts before the service and also because I kind of lost interest in the entire ‘church thing’. It was pretty cool to ring the bell too early or too late though, because that really annoyed the priest and the entire church was looking at you in a ‘when the hell is he going to hit the gong’ kind of way. Sheer power :)
  3. I was a loner during elementary school and I bought off friendship with candy. During lunch recess we got to play soccer, and I always had to be the goalie because I was a little more fat than the other guys of my class. They were also playing in local youth teams so I never got to play ‘in the field’. Then we got to the finale of the inter-class competetion and we ended up taking penalties. All the wizzkids missed their shot, or it got blocked by the goalie. Then, because we ran out of ‘pro’ players, I finally had the chance to actually try to make a goal. I kicked the ball right under the cross of the goal and all of the sudden I was everyone’s friend, at least for the next week. Then I got back to being the goalie because no one else wanted to do it.
  4. I loved to draw and doodle when I was in high school and did some graffiti work back in the days, mostly on bridges or electricity cabins next to railways. I used the skill to write the names of the girls and boys in my class in some fancy urban style and they loved it. It made me less of a loner. I had a few anarchistic, anti-establishment friends when I was about 15 or so, but I needed a look-out for a nightly job and invited them to come along. I planned do to a nice piece of futuristic city-scapes, but all they wanted to do was spray things like ‘fuck the state’ and ‘imperialistic whores’. I started bombing the wall, but since the punks were smoking and drinking and spraying themselves, they failed to keep an eye open for possible witnesses. Then the cops arrived and we had to flee on our bikes, into the night. I never cycled so fast in my life. I bet at that time I could’ve beaten Lance Armstrong or so. Anyway, I never got caught because I was still sober. The two punks got arrested and they really wanted to tell my name to the cops, but they didn’t know it. Hah. Hard to tell on someone if you don’t have a name. The two punks had to pay for the repainting of the bridge, and four months later when it was done, I put a nice new piece over the fresh white walls. Felt great.
  5. I played classical guitar for over 6 years, finished my classes of music theory and all that, but stopped going to the music school because I never got to play on an electrical guitar like the guys from Metallica, which was why I started studying guitar in the first place.

Bonus, because I got four sticks:

  1. I participated in the Belgian Championship of 1995 for the “Magic: The Gathering” fantasy card game. I ended up with the last ten.
  2. My dad and me are bee keepers. Every summer we harvest honey from them. It just fascinates me how they live, what they do and I can spend hours just sitting in front of the boxes, watching the bees fly in and out.

Hmm. Who should I pass this on to? Kris? Oh, no you just got it. Most of the other bloggers I know or read have already been tagged with this in one way or the other, or they’re not into personal things on their blogs. I’ll just ask it out in the open. Whoever wants this stick, drop a line in the comments and I’ll link you here.

Update:
First stick goes to Grapplica | second stick goes to Darren Straight

 

Blog Dinner With Nice People

15 Nov 2006

There’s a bloggers dinner on the 17th of November, which is Friday (this week). Tom Raftery one of Europe’s better known podcasters (Jeven award winning) will be over and would love to meet with some Belgian bloggers… He has talked with a hell of a lot of big names in this space, those podcasts are available at www.podleaders.com and his blog is www.tomrafteryit.net.

Simon McDermott from Attentio.com will be your host, and he’s inviting Belgian bloggers to attend. If you have nothing planned or are able to switch some appointments, you’re welcome to join the group at the Strofilia restaurant, which is near Place St. Catherine (Brussels).

Check here for restaurant info

Drop a line to Simon asap if you’re planning to come. [simon at attentio dot com]

 

Shel Israel & Rick Segal

22 Oct 2006

I went to a Blog Dinner (capitals intended) yesterday. MSN once again upped the ante by choosing a fabulous location. We met at noon at the prestigeous Belga Queen Super-Deluxe Oyster Bar/Lounge/Restaurant in Brussels and besides the fact we got to meet Shel Israel and Rick Segal, we were served delicious food in good company. Good food and conversations, that sort of stuff goes straight to my heart.

I talked to Shel about the book he ghost-authored with Scoble (Naked Conversations) and about the benefits it has to offer to companies that still need to define a good and transparent blogging policy. Shel has some really great insights. I’m glad I had a chance to talk to him. I also met Simon McDermott from Attentio and we had a really interesting talk about the brand rumor tracking tools. Too bad I didn’t end up next to Rick because I think that would’ve been interesting as well… Time, as always, flew by way too fast.

I finally met Veerle Pieters, the godess of CSS and design and probably the best known blogger outside the Belgian borders. In all honesty, she rocks! Also there and in for some good conversation was Jean Philip De Tender who’s currently working as program manager and content coordinator at ‘één’, the Flemish TV and radio broadcasting company. After dinner I also talked to Geert Desager. Last time we met over e-mail he was still working for Tagora (an ad agency), but he’s now working for Microsoft on the trade department.

Some of the usual suspects were there as well, and we had some good talks. Networking kicks butt. I’m so glad I went. I’m so glad I was invited. There’s only one word left: Awesome. No wait: Cool.

Thanks Bea, Kris and Simon for putting this together. I had a great time!

More pictures on Flickr © Pietel
Also see my pics, on Flickr too :)

Update: More pictures from Veerle and Peter

 

R|Mail Inside

15 Oct 2006

Randy tuned R|Mail a bit and it’s becoming a popular web service with 27.272 users and 68.504 subs. R|Mail is crawling 34.065 feeds. That’s very cool. At this time, my blog is ranked 12th with 264 subscribers. The widget to subscribe to my feed is in the sidebar of the blog. You’ll get your blog-update notification shortly after I’ve set the new post live, if you subscribe, you’ll be amongst the first to know of new goodies, so if you haven’t done so already, enter your e-mail address and join the club!

I asked Randy to give me three good reasons why R|Mail is better than FeedBlitz and here’s what Randy had to say:

Many FeedBlitz users say it doesn’t work and they never get their emails

A FeedBlitz publisher gets your email address when you subscribe, you are giving up your email to both FeedBlitz and the publisher, he can unsubscribe you and he can subscribe you to other mailing lists without you wanting that

FeedBlitz is confusing. You can’t just go to http://www.feedblitz.com/ and subscribe to something

He also added: if you read the FeedBlitz blog, then you’ll find a few times every month where the end user asks why his stuff isn’t working – they don’t even bother responding

here * here

FeedBlitz is actually broken and many users are switching to Rmail. Recently I’m gaining about 100 subscriptions per day. Here’s some posts that I’ve found on the FeedBlitz problems.

* here * here

And if you read the FeedBlitz blog, you’ll find the last 2 weeks that it’s mostly entries about why their service is not working.

* here * here * here

Further, if you read the comments for the last two months on their blog, you’ll see people complaining that they are not getting their emails.

* here * here * here * here

So, that’s why I’m very happy with R|Mail, with the speed it delivers the news and the ease of use. If you need a trustworthy service for your readers, I’d put my money on R|Mail and give it a go. You’ll see.

R|Mail

R|Mail Subscription page
R|Mail Blog
R|Mail Stats

 
 

Paging Doctor Wolf

14 Oct 2006

Yesterday was BlogCom night. Getting there took me ages since the train I took had a five minute delay in Leuven (where I work) and the other train I needed a connection with was kind enough to leave on time, so I was stranded for over half an hour in the middle of f*cking nowhere (aka Aarschot). Then when I got home (finally) and took the car to drive to Antwerp, I was stuck in a traffic jam for over 8 kilometers. Fashionably late I made my entry somewhere around 8.15 PM. More than an hour later than I wanted to. Thank you, public transportation. Thank you, old man who drove first in the single lane traffic jam, fearing the number 30 and everything above that on the speed-o-meter of his car. I stick with the point that there should be a rule that forbids owners of license plates with 5 digits instead of 6 to come out between 4 PM and 8 AM. Those people are clearly afraid of traffic (maybe because of their age) and should be protected by grounding them. But anyway, BlogCom… that’s where we were.

I shared a table with next to me Bruno from B.V.L.G. and the guys from the Tech podcasting crew Absurdnet.com. At the same table where Dries (i think) (who used to work at i-merge before they moved to the place where I work at now) and a nice lady who blogs at a fruity place called GeleBanaan (yellow banana). The other head of the table (I sat on one end) was Pascal Van Hecke, who sat right in front of me. [There were some other folks at our table as well, but I didn't get the chance of talking to them, which is way too bad.]

Jeroen organized it quite well, again, and maybe it’s time someone else did a third BlogCom in another city so he could actually enjoy it as well instead of running around like a madman, trying to get it all worked out. Great job dude!

I had a nice talk with some people I already knew like Robin, Clo, Luc, Rik and James, and I got the chance to meet some new bloggers like tantieris and the blokes from Appelogen, an arty project featuring Doctor Wolf, YourMama and Chris Dust. Doctor Wolf, as his name might indicate is ummm… an impressive man to say the least. Those three guys… :) Really :) Wow.

I also met the team behind TenderFeelings and HungryFeelings, and I’m quite impressed about the results they made with their out of control hobby project. I’ll try to keep an eye on that more often.

Somewhere later in the evening, Kris Hoet from MSN managed to drop in on his way home from his trip to Amsterdam and also the most famous chest in the blogosphere, Schenkr, and the sophisticated Mister Druppels arrived to have a little chat.

Amongst other people that were there were also the Netlash team, MouseOver, Asfaltkonijn on a marketing frenzy with balloons and Pietel.

Last but not least, I had a really interesting chat with Stefan Kölgen about how f*cking hard it can be to produce something that Coolz0r would blog [not hard at all, just send email :) ] and about the importancy of the upcoming event they’re organizing next Friday, which I’ll have to pass on to my colleague Tom over at i-merge, because someone should really be there.

I’m really glad I went to BlogCom to network and meet some new people. That’s the good part of it: you come home with a bunch of links and you have a few extra feeds to start reading (or podcasts to listen to). Fresh input, new opinions… That’s a really positive thing.

Lesson of the evening: good mothers always bring the power cables to the Nintendo DS gadgets when bringing along the kids. It’ll make sure you’ll get some peace and quietness, for as long as level one takes. :)

The full list of participants is after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

 

RSS 2 Gif

12 Oct 2006

Now here’s a cunning idea to promote your favorite RSS feed. RSS-2-Gif creates an image of your post titles and lets you decide how many you want to have on display. I suggest 5 topics is a normal average, because clicking on the image takes people to your site, not to the post itself. The image updates itself every time it is loaded and makes sure people see the latest items you’ve blogged. If you put this in the footer of your e-mails, you’ll be promoting your own blog (or the one from someone you like) and drive more traffic to your site.

It looks like this:



RSS2GIF

Get your own on RSS-2-Gif

Weird thing is: if you want to right-click and save the generated image, it says it’s a .png file. Hmm. That doesn’t match with the concept, but let’s not start nagging about that.

You can edit the generated HTML code and cut out the promotional image for RSS-2-Gif, but to be nice, I’ll add their button here anyway. What you see below is normally added in the middle under the light blue image that displays your feed items. I think they should work on a more sophisticated way to promote theirselves because the button isn’t really fitting in right with the rest of the project. If I’m going to use this in my e-mail footer, it’s going to be without the button. I mean, they already have the text in the generated image of my feed items, no?