The Next Web Awards: Not Your Usual Awards!

The Next Web Conference started an award (The Next Web Awards) this year. It is the ONLY award in the world that you get for future accomplishments. We selected a bunch of start-ups and people and nominated them for the different sections.

But not only the award is different. The voting system is quite special too. You don’t just vote once but can empower your vote.

Vote in all 8 categories and we will double your votes.
Use the ‘Send a Friend’ feature and we will again double your votes.
Add the Widget to your site or blog we will again triple your votes.
If you play along you can actually upgrade your 8 votes times 12.

The philosophy is that all people are NOT created equal and some votes are more important than others. Help spread the word and your vote will become more important. Because I blog and people read my blog my vote is more important than someone who doesn’t spread the news.

No word yet on wther this will be implemented in general politics too but I voted in all categories, emailed my friends AND added the Widget to my site here.

Do me a favor and click on the Next Web Award Widget in my sidebar and vote too…

Here is the (copy pasted) list of nominees:

Entertainment (Let me entertain you!)
DailyMotion, Second Life, Joost, Metacafe, World of Warcraft, LastFM, Youtube

Company (One company, to rule them all..)
Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo Apple, Google.

Social (You and me)
Plaxo, XING, meebo, Twitter, Cambrian House, Cyworld, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hyves, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, ebuddy, Dogster, LinkedIn

Disruptors (Give me your share, now!)
Pixenate, A Swarm of Angels, Sellaband, Zopa, Netvibes, Open ID, Zecco, Turn, Edgeio, Joost, 37signals

Web Celeb (Who’s the (wo)man!)
Tom Anderson, Steve Jobs, Lonelygirl15, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Rose, Marc Andreessen, Michael Arrington, Tariq Krim

Beta & Stealth (Rookie of the year)
Trayle, SpendView, Sxipper, Radar, LouderVoice, Hypesphere, Mailemotion, Tipit.to, Fleck, miniRSS, Powerset, Outback online , Swoot, Wakoopa, Joost, Intense Debate, Plum, PolarRose, Freebase, Twones, Spotplex, Diigo, wunderLOOP Connect

Populizr (Show me the visitors)
TechCrunch, Slashdot, Netscape, Meneame, MyBlogLog, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg

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Ask the Entrepreneur: Egg or Chicken?

This morning I was having breakfast with Diederik Martens from Twones.com. A truck pulled up right in front of us and opened its doors. Inside must have been a few thousands eggs.

A mother pointed to the car and asked her 2 year old son “What is inside the big car?” to which the little boy replied “eggs!“.

Diederik looked at me and said:

“An Entrepreneur would have said ‘Chickens’…”

We got a good laugh out of that one, decided it was a blogable thing and then took this photo with the build in iSight in my MacBook pro.

Not If Only But Despite

In 1993 I wrote, designed and published my first book. I wrote and published one more book and then I started my first company and eventually started blogging.

And that pretty much sums up my career as a writer.

But in 1993 I was pretty serious about writing and my books. The whole thing suited me well. People like writers. There is a romantic side to the whole writers thing that attracts, ehm, people.

Anyway, when I was a semi-official writer I often spoke to people who told me they were going to write a book too.
Maybe.
One day.
If they saved enough money to take a year off.
Because they wanted to do it right.
Or not at all.

I don’t believe they ever did write that book, took that year off and did it right. A lot of people are very good in implementing If Onlys for themselves. If Only…

…I would have enough money
…I had more visitors
…I was a little bit more lucky
…my boss would give me more resources
…I would have been a bit earlier
…that other guy wouldn’t have stolen my idea
…we would have more funding
…my laptop wouldn’t have crashed

These days I speak to a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs. They tell me they dream of becoming an entrepreneur and quiting their jobs.

But Only If.

For an entrepreneur there are no If Onlys. Only Despites.

Despite…

…the fact that we didn’t have any money
…the competition
…the fact that we had NO resources
…the weather, our health and the fact that my hair was on fire
…the circumstances

Despite whatever comes on your way you do what you gotta do to get things done.
No If Only/But/When/Only If.
No excuses, no way out.
Only possibilities, in spite of reality.
Despite becomes Because.
Limitations are Circumstances.
Not If Only But Despite.

So tell me, are YOU an ‘If Only’ or a ‘Despite’ person?

OpenOffice San Francisco?

Next week (3 to 10 May) Patrick, Arjen and I will be in San Francisco for a week. We’re going to meet up with some friends, show Fleck.com to a few people and meet some of the speakers for The Next Web Conference.

And we will work there too.

Our trip to London Open Coffee Meetup gave us an idea. After the Open Coffee meetup we had an appointment at Index Ventures’ office. Once that was done we we’re allowed to use the conference room as our office for remainder of the day.

For our trip to San Francisco we are looking for startups (or established companies) who have office space for us (a table, 3 chairs and a wifi connection is all we need) for one day. This is a nice way to meet new people and work at the same time. We will blog about the office on the Fleck blog, Patricks Blog, The Next Web blog and here.

So, who’s up for OpenOffice? I’ve checked some potential startup offices that are in the neighborhood were we like to crash… uuh work: Sixapart, Technorati, Furl, Rojo, Rollyo, Eurekster, Wists, Dogster, Twitter, Flickr, Upcoming, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mashery and Plaxo

But anywhere is fine!

A Rainbow in the Dark

Nicky Zwaan is a dutch artist and friend of us. She invents/constructs/builds great works of art. A few night ago she constructed a real rainbow, outside, in the dark! Check the video:

Revenge: ClosedEyeTalkers

Do you know what a Closed Eye Talker is? It is an arrogant person who closes his or her eyes when they speak at you. They blink their eyes just like the rest of us but sometimes one of those blinks seems to take 3 whole seconds or more.

According to body language experts the person who does this would rather be in another place, away from you, and feels so superior that he doesn’t even want to look at a lowly person like you.

Or maybe they are just very tired or surrealists. More on that later.

I know at least 4 people who are Closed Eye Talkers and it has always annoyed me immensely. Until I read a great book about Body Language I didn’t know what to do about it. But now I do. I have found the ultimate revenge and now actually look forward to meeting a Closed Eye Talker. I can hardly wait!

This is the trick: the moment someone closes their eyes while talking with you, you immediately take a big step to the left or right. The person with the closed eyes will assume you didn’t move and will be completely disoriented when he opens his eyes and you are gone. The effect is tremendous! Like you have completely disappeared and re-appeared somewhere else.

I tested it this weekend with 2 friends and had so much fun. We took turns closing our eyes and doing The Move. Try it too in the office tomorrow and then tell everyone you know.

It is time to fight back at those arrogant Closed Eye Talkers and now we have the weapons to do it…

These guys are not Closed Eye Talkers. This is a photo taken in 1929 in the first Photomaton (Photobooth?) in Paris. The reason these man have their eyes closed is that they are surrealists. The surrealists were fascinated by the self. Not the conscious, rational self but the subconscious side of their being. They were dreamers and used the Photomaton to illustrate this by posing with their eyes closed.

So before you apply the Closed Eye Talkers Revenge Move first find out if you might be dealing with a surrealist. If not, go for it!

So proud…

We are in the city theatre of Amstelveen where Loïs is dancing in her first show. She is only 5. We are here at the balcony waiting for the show to start. 30 years ago I was a ballet dancer too. There were only 2 other boys and 300 girls. Admitting that I was a ballet dancer was a good reason to be picked on by all the bullies in school. But the yearly show was worth it.

And now Loïs is dancing too. I feel like I’m suddenly part of another generation.

New Word of the Week: Blogable

Once you start writing for a blog you look at the world differently. Objects, events and people will be either ‘blogable’ or not.

In the last few weeks I have heard several people use the word as qualification for things. When I tell a story at the office my partners at the office will say “Wow, Blogable!” and I’ll know it was good.

Turns out that it is a known word. Check it out at the Urban Dictionary: blogable