Shame on me for coming up with a word-cloud when everyone else has been bugging you with word-clouds for the past year or so. But still it’s quite interesting to see what I’ve been writing about up ’till now. That sharing is a big thing may come as no surprise, although I wasn’t really aware that I’ve been using that word that often. If you want to know what is going to be really hot this year, then it seems like I predict that ‘Location Based’ and Games are the big thing. At least that is true if you assume that I write about things that are still upcoming.

(click to embiggen)

I’m excited to tell you that already twice this month I’ve been on Dutch Radio 1 with a column about news, tips and tricks on the internet. New Dutch broadcasting organization PowNed has invited me to make a column for the weekly late-night radio-show ‘Echte Jannen‘.

For those of you who understand Dutch:you can tune in every Sunday night between 24:00 and 02:00 hours or listen to the past show here at radio 1. (Pick 0:00h on Mondays at the ‘terugluisteren op tijd’ option.) PowNed is a broadcasting organization that wants to make programs aimed at the ‘network generation’, a generation that by the way does not let itself describe by a single age-group or other demographic. It’s television and radio programs as well as it’s website hope to fulfill the need for quick, fast and raw information. I’m very happy that they’ve offered me the chance to get on the radio and tell my story about what I believe has been important online in the past week or so.

More information, again in Dutch, can be found at Wikipedia about PowNed in general and the show ‘Echte Jannen‘ in particular. (I figure you understand that my column is named ‘Ctrl Alt Delete’.) Or follow the twitter account here.

‘The mobile web will be mature when we don’t speak about it as being mobile anymore’, is just one of those things that describe the future of the internet. Dutch magazine HP/deTijd currently runs an (offline) issue on the future of the internet. If you can read Dutch, go and get it; they were kind enough to ask me for a discussion on the future of the internet to be featured in on me of the articles.

What will the internet look like in 2020? This was the central question about the discussion I had with Gerard van Oortmerssen of ‘ICT regie’, Richard Lamb and Pim Nauts. In the article I talk about the notion that even online you will have leaders and followers and employers expect to see you online more and more, not hiding because it could look bad for you.

picture by Jorg

It is often said that the key to ‘how social media works’, or at least how you can gain inlfuence as an actor in social media is staying honest and true to what you believe as a person. (ie: don’t try to operate as a typical company) Although one can certainly make arguments against that, I do support the notion that an open and honest approach is appreciated by many. This is true in real life, but even more so online, where hiding ones true intentions can be a lot easier.

Thus, when it became apparent that the Dutch ‘twitterer of the year’ election was set up by a advertisement agency people began to criticise they way this was set up. Of course it didn’t take long before freelance journalist Bert Brussen announced on twitter that he would take care of organising something more fun. What followed is an example of a typical social media effort.

This is how Twittershizzle got born; an effort to do something fun for twitterers (or ‘tweeps’) that was more than just meeting up for some drinks. You could call it crowdsourcing, but maybe that doesn’t do justice to how these kind of things usually work. With Bert’s following on twitter he quickly gained attention and a buzz of enthusiasm was spreading through the Dutch twittersphere. With friends and colleagues from the Dutch weblog deJaap Bas Paternotte and Levi Boitelle agreeing to help the event was taking shape.

As part of the deJaap editorial board I was happy to do my share in making this event a success. It wasn’t a complete smooth ride, but we all know our fair share of how things work online, so in the end we got it together. Staying true to what we thought would be fun to do, not thinking too much about marketing practices we managed to get it done; #Twittershizzle the Twitter event was born and would take place on the 9th of February.

Word about this event spread quickly, and set up as a free event with artists and musicians participating for next to nothing it became quite something. There was a stream from ‘Ted’, there were paintcartoons, there were writers, there was beer and there was more beer and sigarettes.

(CC Photo by Anne Helmond)

I’ve been setting up meetings for more than 10 years now, from get-togethers in the local pub to lectures, but this was something unique indeed. A nice 300 active twitterers from all kinds of sub groups in the Dutch sphere showed up, along with newscrews from papers, radio and television, trying to see what this could possible be.

Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with organizing something and making a profit out of it. But especially online people want to participate, not just be bothered with offers or things that they should really buy in to. Or as Bert Brussen puts it:

beware of stains on your purple pants

Personally this all is what I love the most about the internet. You get together with long-time online friends, strangers and everyone in between, while others are still trying to grasp what this is really about. Yes, “the internet really is my thing” and I love every second of it. What’s next? I can say a new Twittershizzle, and plans for international versions of this type of event are uttered, so we’ll see where we stand, tomorrow, next month, next year. And never forget that it’s you, it’s me, it’s us all together making fabulous things happen again and again, sometimes failing miserably, but always creating something beautiful. I hope this will come across on television as bright as I feel it now.

Of course most of the postings about Twittershizzle are in Dutch, but you can search by Hashtag if you’d like and pictures can be found here or here. A nice linkdump with even more and some (Dutch spoken) videos is here on Mark Hulstein’s blog.

I’m not going to say “someone had to do it” because I’m not really sure, but the fact is that Levi has made a fanpage for me, on Facebook. So I guess this might be my first bit of fame. If you really like me, or just my handle ThE_ED, you can become a fan of me here… And no, I’m not a fan of myself yet.

In the meantime 2009 is coming to an end and so we find ourselves looking back and making lists about just about anything. The überlist of course is twitter, that itself has lists and I ‘ve even spotted a website listing twitterlists. Jeroen Mirck has compiled the Dutch “Twitter Top-40” of 2009 (Dutch Article) and new on the 8th spot is me! Women seem to be taking over the heavy tweepslist, so I should perhaps make up an excuse already for next year as to why I’ve dropped so many places.

A couple of months ago I noticed something strange; some of my tweets didn’t always show up in the twitter search. Quite soon it appeared that my hashtags were not indexed or omitted from the search functionality. Whenever I would click a hashtag to find it’s latest connected tweets I would never see any of my tweets. At first I thought that this might be some smart thing on the side of Twitter, where it would omit your own tweets from any search you would do. This didn’t turn out to be the case, however as it also happened when using a different system where I wasn’t logged in. I didn’t think too much of it, keeping in mind more search troubles with twitter that had been reported earlier this year.  The fact that this also keeps me from being included in backchannels made me think after a while and I searched a bit more.

Of course I was quick to find that inclusion in the Twitter search seemed to be a hot item in the Twitter help section, thus it did not take me too long before finding a bit more. A lot of missing tweets seem to be missing due to resource constraints, but as I’m a fairly active user and I’ve been active for more than a year this didn’t seem to apply to me. Being really active might be the underlying reason though. I checked out Twitter’s tips on missing tweets and found that they are also filtering on quality.

Now this quality filtering might be the cause of me being blocked in Twitter. Of course; my tweets are often in Dutch, but that can’t be the problem. Instead I think it’s because of the way I use hashtags. They are great to define a subject, so you can tweet with #db09 and appear in searches for the Dutch Bloggies. But the thing is, in “my” group are used for giving a context to tweets in a more varied way. Thus one could tweet “I really dislike these kind of things. #hamburgers”, thus indicating one adds to the ongoing hamburger discussion there. Even though I just tweet a lot of “general chatter”, I do not think my tweets are bad quality wise in a way that I spam products or websites or any other “bad” behavior. Instead it might be the hashtag thing; way more people tweet in this way, but most don’t tweet as much as me… Then again, it could also be that once in a while I retweet a normal tweet of someone known as a spammer, or any other reason. Not only is it a bit annoying; it’s even more annoying that you’re not sure as to why you seem to be blocked.

On a positive note; I have never gotten a single “Britney” spam follower because they probably don’t find my tweets and the followercount of my @ThE_ED account doesn’t seem to suffer. (Which indicates that people find people through recommendations and tweets of others, but one can never be sure of course.)

Despite my Hungarian first name I can’t speak any of the language. A beginnerscourse Hungarian has been lying around for quite some time, but I still haven’t started, yet. But I’ve decided to start with it this week and I’m going to keep track of my advancements here. This will probably be the only really “lifelog” part of this blog, but ‘so be it’. A friend of mine is forcing himself to keep studying on his spanish course in a similar manner, so I thought that would be a good idea for me as well.

Not sure if learning some basic Hungarian will be of any benefit to me, but on the other hand it never hurts to learn an other language. I still wonder how well I will be able to read, write and speak it though, it’s quite different from Dutch and English and any other language I’ve ever tried.

update: no haven’t started yet, really …