June 2021 – Ramon Stoppelenburg

The day my music died

Back to this day, June 25 in 2009.

I escaped my home in Amsterdam for a week off and bought myself a night train ride to Italy. And after a few days in the metropolis city of Milan, I continued on to Rome in a 3-hour train ride through the green country side. I was able to couchsurf with a young Italian couple living in the outer suburbs of Rome.

They basically took my hand and dragged me along in their Italian life. When they were working, I managed to explore Vatican City, I saw the Pantheon, ate pizzas and saw the impressive Colosseum. And I probably visited all 19 basilicas, because I am a nerd. And I did what the Romans do: eat all that delicious gelato ice cream. All day long. It was a hot summer day.

In the early evenings I would meet up with my hosts again and life was very pleasant. We played music, they invited friends over or we went out for drinks.

I was very lucky when one of my hosts had to work in the security department of a big stadium concert. If I wanted to join her. Yes, of course. It was a concert by Tiziano Ferro. “He is the Michael Jackson of Italy. Our biggest pop star!”, she said. I remembered that name. Tiziano had a little summer hit in The Netherlands earlier (youtube). Thanks to my hostess I was able to get into the stadium if I only could just help out the people in their wheelchair area in front of the stage and make sure they are all happy there. What a blast that was. And the crowd sung along. I learned some more Italian and the concert was an absolute joy to attend.

It was just after the show, when I was taken backstage in the catacombs of the stadium and waiting for my hostess to be finished with her job, when the mood changed by a full180 degrees.

I had a received a text message on my phone from a good friend in The Netherlands. Everybody around me seemed to have received such a message. People were on their phone sending more messages. This wasn’t the time yet when we all had data and could surf to the BBC website for a news update. It went by phone and texts. People were in disbelief. Some people cried.

The night ended in mourning. Playing the music. Sharing stories. Have more wine or beer. Staring out of the windows.

It was the day Michael Jackson died.

Letmestayforaday becomes UNESCO Digital Heritage

the blog of Ramon Stoppelenburg June 22, 2021

The story below is the English translation of the original story, written by Janske Mollen, for De Stentor, a Dutch national newspaper. (click here for the original Dutch story)

Conceived on the back of a beer coaster in a pub in Zwolle, since today it has been labeled ‘UNESCO Digital World Heritage’ by the Dutch Royal Library. The website Letmestayforaday.com of the Zwolle former journalism student Ramon Stoppelenburg will be saved forever for posterity.

The Royal Library of the Netherlands in The Hague, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), sees it as its task to preserve websites in a sustainable way and to keep them accessible and to protect them from loss. That is why the KB archives websites that as a collection provide a ‘representative picture of Dutch culture, history and society on the internet’.

“Many of those websites contain unique information,” says collection specialist Peter de Bode of the web archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. “Sometimes those websites disappear when the owner no longer has the money to keep it up. Or because the technology is outdated. .”

Stoppelenburg’s website has been selected for the construction of a special KB collection of blogs. “Very special”, Stoppelenburg says. He responds via Skype from Phnomh Penh in Cambodia, where he has lived for several years. “Who would have thought, that when I was with my friends at the bar of student café, Iscribbled a few words on a coaster? I can still hear a friend wonder out loud ‘Who’s ever going to invite you to their home?’.”

International
The idea behind letmestayforaday.com was to see more of the world. At the time, Stoppelenburg studied journalism at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences. But he got the idea through the American website sendmeadollar.com. “But I didn’t want money, I wanted to travel.” In exchange for an overnight stay or a lift from address A to B, he would write about his adventures on his website, one of the first weblogs. After the launch of letmestayforaday.com in 2001, he received offered airfare and lodging from all over the world, he was closely followed by the international media and traveled for two years without spending a dime.

“I thought I would travel around Europe for a few years,” Stoppelenburg looks back. “But that I was allowed to travel halfway around the world?” With the help of tourism agencies and generous donors (a lady from Canada offered him Airmiles: ‘Otherwise you’ll never come to Canada’) he also traveled from address to address through South Africa, Australia and Canada. His experiences were followed worldwide and as soon as it was clear that he would visit a country, the invitations poured in.

Unique
Stoppelenburg finds it particularly special that his website is now ‘digital heritage’, because his website is in English. According to De Bode, that does not matter: “The criteria for being selected are that the information on the website should preferably be unique, that the site should be under Dutch management and that it should say something about culture, history and society. on the internet.” De Bode was also intrigued by the Stoppelenburg website: “Two years of free travel, that is so unique.”

10 million websites
KB has been working on a web archive since 2007. “In the meantime, 13,400 websites have been selected, says De Bode. “Every year, 1,000 to 1,500 are added. In total there are 10 million Dutch websites. This also includes websites with the extensions .com .eu .info. There are 5.8 million of the .nl extensions.” Archiving is not very fast, says the archivist. “That is because the selection is done manually, then the owners have to be emailed, they have four weeks to decline. Then we start archiving automatically.”

Vlogs
And not every website is archivable. Vlogs are mainly visual material that cannot be archived. Also because they are often on YouTube and we cannot archive that.”

Incidentally, archiving is sometimes also delayed by the archivists themselves. ,,I must honestly say that I did linger on the Stoppelenburg website for a while, yes. That does happen every now and then, when we come across something special to review.”

World Heritage
The fact that websites are ‘digital heritage’ is internationally recognized in the Unesco Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage from 2003. “They call it world heritage”, says De Bode. “We regard it as digital heritage”. interest in websites that threaten to go offline. If that happens, we’ll lose them, and the information on them too.”

That World Blogging Forum 2009 in Bucharest

the blog of Ramon Stoppelenburg Travel June 10, 2021

It is 2009. It all started with a suspicious email.

“Hello Ramon, we are inviting you to come to the World Blogging Forum in Bucharest in two weeks. Let us know your details and we arrange the flights.”

Me: “This is a scam, right?”

“Not at all. Have a look at our website. We have a full program with many bloggers from all over the world and are backed up by the Romanian government and all. Oh, and it will all take place at The Palace of the Parliament [only the second biggest building in the world]. We need you to be there too.”

We were not “bloggers” like how they are known nowadays. All participants were mostly the first ever people publishing on the internet. Some participants had no rights or freedom of expression in their own country. Some could not come because they were afraid. Others were arrested and detained when they returned to their home country after this event.

It was one of the highest honors to be present and discuss along with people with such caliber.

This was in times when we were still figuring out what this Twitter thing could mean. The world was modernizing really fast and phones lost buttons and became smarter. Don’t even think about uploading a video from your phone onto Youtube yet, though. Instagram did not even exist for another 3 years.

This ended up to be one my most dearest experiences ever. The people. The ideas. The care by all the English University students. Tours. The parks. The enthusiasm. (The after parties). Bucharest.

How to keep a place forever in a heart.