28 April 2005

Blognomics 2005 Amsterdam


On April 21st I attended the Blognomics 2005 Symposium at the RAI Conference Center in Amsterdam. Put together by Guido van Nispen and his merry crew, this event shined a spotlight on the landscape of blogging in the Netherlands for us to see. You can access the speakers' presentations here.

What caught my attention was the growing influence of MSN's "Spaces" mini-blog product - expanding on the MSN Messenger platform where people can share more than just words. Within a few months of introduction, MSN Spaces had enlisted more than 500,000 people here in the Netherlands. When you consider that Ilse Media hosts almost 100,000 bloggers on its server of the approximate 250,000 blogs here, MSN Spaces is sweeping up the average person who just wants to share with his immediate community of friends and family. Their connectivity is at an intimate level and enabled with photo sharing.

The more serious bloggers - for both personal and business blogging - are using Ilse Media, Blogger, and MoveableType or Typepad from Six Part.

Another eye-opener for me was the number of serious business bloggers only blogging in the Dutch language. When I read through their blogs, I realized they were hubs for sharing what was happening in their own market and also filtering and adapting the English language trends and concepts into Dutch for distribution. Now I want to discover the Dutch bloggers who are translating the Dutch trends and concepts for global digestion. If you are, please send me your link!

Jonathan Marks and I interviewed some of the speakers and attendees on camera. We caught these speakers: Guido van Nispen our host, Paul Molenaar from Ilse Media, Loic Le Meur from Six Apart, Marco Derksen from his blog MarketingFacts, and Peter Olsthoorn the journalist who publishes Netkwesties. We wanted to capture their thoughts about the impact of blogging and how it's reshaping how we do business. Jonathan will compile these video interviews and post them once he returns from his trip to Mexico City for a conference on the future of broadcasting.

Check out the photos from Blognomics 2005.

Other blogging members of our working group The Dutch Connection were also there: Jonathan Marks, Ton Zijlstra, Elmine Wijnia, and James Burke.

Many of the links to Blognomics 2005 are in the Dutch language because this was a symposium in Dutch for local participants.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Colby, it was nice meeting you at Blognomics!

Some Dutch bloggers that could be interesting are Yuri van Geest and Monique van Dusseldorp. Yuri has it's own blog at http://yuri.typepad.com/ and Monique is writing for different blogs, e.g. http://www.poynter.org/