Meet-the-Minister: a Dutch Tweetup

Here in the Netherlands, almost everyone who's aware of Twitter knows that our Minister of Foreign Affairs - Maxime Verhagen - is a big fan of the micro-blogging service. With 17,000 followers he's one of the more famous Dutchmen on Twitter. In fact, our foreign minister was the first Dutch politician to start twittering, and in all fairness, he did so well ahead of the recent European elections. Nowadays, no self-respecting politician can afford not to twitter. One political party here went to the trouble of summarising its entire political programme in ten tweets!

Back to Maxime Verhagen: he's a frequent user of Twitter and everyone who follows him can read his Dutch tweets on what he's doing, and every now and than see what he is up to - he sometimes uploads pictures.

Foreign minister Maxime Verhagen, a famous twitterer, also shares pictures on twitpic, like this one from South Korea. Photo Maxime Verhagen / Twitter

Verhagen kind of got into trouble with our Prime Minister once for posting a picture taken during an ministerial meeting on Twitpic.

In the meantime, Twitter is fast becoming the main communication tool on the internet according to a recent article on the Washington Post and our Minister of Foreign Affairs continues to happily tweet...

Earlier this year, the minister organized a first Tweetup to meet for a relative small number of his followers and he now decided to organize another get-together at his ministry. To make a long story short: in a tweet he announced this new tweetup. More than 400 followers applied and out of those 100 were chosen (or randomly drawn?).

And I am one of the lucky ones!

So follow me on Twitter and watch out for the "#bz" tags. Most of those tweets will be in Dutch, but I will suggest another tag for English tweets about the event: #bz_en