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Lorelle has just published a really good list of recommended Israeli blogs in both Hebrew and English on The Blog Herald. These blogs are all about "real" life in Israel - getting up in the morning, business, family, etc. It’s a great list, and these bloggers deserve the exposure.
Lorelle has kindly written an article for the Israeli blogging community full of blogging tips, and explaining her connection to Israel (I was very curious about that!). Read on….it’s the usual Lorelle masterpiece. Also, see her post on her blog about WordCamp Israel: "WordCamp Israel October 25 with Lorelle."
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When I told a friend of mine in Israel that I was going to be presenting a program in San Francisco on blogging, she sighed.
Oh, that blogging thing. You want to know what the problems with blogs are?
Too many blogs look like they were written in 10 minutes by someone who clearly:
1. Can't type
2. Can't think.
3. Make you think maybe they have computers in the institution or they were released for the day.
I used that as the introduction to my program the next day, and the crowd loved it. They loved it because it’s true. Read the rest of this entry »
A lot has been happening since the last time I wrote, so here are some updates:
Jacob Share over at JobMob (which runs on WordPress) has kindly translated the WordCamp Israel schedule into English. You can see it on our About page here, or on his blog.
WordCamp Israel has an official website, a date, place, and keynote speaker who is none other than Lorelle!
This is an amazing achievement, considering the fact that this is all the fruit of a casual conversation that took place between a few Israeli bloggers.
For more info, go to this site’s About page. If you want to attend, make sure to sign up fast! The venue can only hold up to 250 people, and without any publicity already 50 people have signed up. So go here, and enter your name, email address and website. Don't mess around with your details or you risk being removed from the list.
The lectures and panels scheduled for the event include WordPress installation, plugins, blogging for business, and Lorelle’s keynote address. I hope to post an English translation of the itinerary here soon.
The Israeli blogosphere is an eclectic space, with bloggers ranging from the very casual to the very serious. Hannit, who is generally agreed to be one of Israel’s leading bloggers, definitely belongs on the serious end of the spectrum. Hannit’s blog features tips on using WordPress, and touches on other technical topics. Her blog posts are helpful, thought-provoking, and well written. Read on to find out what Hannit has to say about blogging, and even more importantly, why her blog is called Achi Dakar (which literally translates into "My brother stabbed," a most unfortunate meaning for a blog title…).
Miriam: Hi Hannit, and thanks for agreeing to this interview. Let’s start with how you started your blogging career. When did you start blogging?
Hannit: I've been blogging for a bit more then a year now. I started with a personal blog on the "blogim" platform, but during the war last summer the platform became unavailable so I decided to move to a self-hosted blog. I did a little research and decided on WordPress. At first, my blog was a mix of personal and professional/technical. Along the way, I fell in love with WordPress and the blog became much more technical and professional. Read the rest of this entry »
Next in our tour of the Israeli blogging scene, we will take a look at the types of English blogs emerging from Israel.
Basically, there are 4 types of blogs being published in English in Israel:
Most of the above blog types are published on a range of platforms, many of course on WordPress. However, one category seems to have almost exclusively preferred one blogging platform: the VC blogs, which are mostly published on TypePad. They obviously don't appreciate the beauty that is WordPress :).
With the hundreds, if not thousands of Israeli blogs out there, it can be hard figuring out where to start. Well, fear not; some energetic individuals have compiled aggregated feeds of Israeli English blogs for easy browsing:
No matter what you are interested in, there’s an Israeli blogger blogging about it. So take a look around…
I mentioned in the previous post that WordPress has Israeli roots. Here’s what I was referring to:
WordPress is a dynamic blogging platform that is built on PHP and MySQL. PHP is what it is today thanks to…two Israelis!
PHP was written by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. In 1997, two Israeli Technion students, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, found Lerdorf’s language to be severely underpowered for developing an eCommerce application they were working on for a university project. They cooperated with Lerdorf to rewrite the parser and renamed the language PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Here’s more on PHP from Wikipedia:
The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP’s core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999.[6] They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel, which actively manages the development of PHP.
In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. The most recent update released by The PHP Group, is for the older PHP version 4 code branch which, as of May 2007, is up to version 4.4.7. PHP 4 will be supported by security updates until 8 August 2008[7].
On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released powered by the new Zend Engine II…The latest stable version, PHP 5.2.4, was released on Aug 30, 2007.
The name "Zend" is comprised of Zeev and Andi’s first names. Andi and Zeev serve as senior executives at Zend. According to the Zend site, PHP powers 20 million websites and enjoys a following of over 4.5 million developers. PHP is the foundation for many open-source web applications, including forums, project management applications, and of course, WordPress.
In the following video, Andi Gutmans gives a good overview of "Web 2.0":
Further reading:
The Israeli WordPress community, led by three dedicated bloggers, is working hard to close on a venue and date for the upcoming WordCamp conference. Right now they have pretty much narrowed it down to two possible places in the Tel Aviv area, one an old Zionist stronghold, and the other a celebration of capitalist philanthropy. The irony in Israel never ceases.
The date will be somewhere towards the end of October, in order to take into account the Sukkot holidays, during which the country shuts down for about two weeks so that everyone can sit in wood huts (or not).
The goals of the conference have more-or-less been identified:
So what’s on the menu?
A tentative list of speakers and panels has been put together, and includes some great topics and bloggers. Some potential topics are:
Hands-on workshops on installing and managing a WordPress blog are also being considered. The goal is to give the participants "homework" that they'll take home and try to implement themselves.
As things become more finalized, I'll keep you all posted. In the meantime, I hope to take you on a tour of the Israeli blogosphere, and take a closer look at WordPress and its Israeli roots…
(Israeli roots? Yup, and if you want to know what I mean, stay tuned!)
To WordPress and all things bloggy,
For the English speakers among you that have strayed here by chance and don't understand the meaning of this bizarre language you see here, It’s Hebrew. This is actually the official blog of WordCamp Israel 2007. Wordcamp 2007 is following an already established tradition of conventions for users of the wordpress platform and anyone interested in it. You can find more information about WordCamp here.
The story behind the creation of the Israeli affiliation of Wordcamp is actually quite funny but not unheard of in internet terms. After a blog post asking why there is no Wordcamp Israel, Tal Galili decided to start this blog and invite wordpress users and efficionados to join him in making that randon thought a reality.
If you build it they will come. Very quickly a thriving community was summoned to decide how to bring this idea to fruition (actually all of this happened less than 3 days ago). Since then, this blog was set up, a community encapsulating a mass of almsot 400 messages was created and a wiki documenting everything was conceived. Two English-speaking sites (the blog herald and ring of blogs) have already announced the event and a respected Israeli business news site reported on it as well. All of this is kind of peculiar since some of the most basic things like the time and place are yet to be decided.
As discussed in all of those discussion board messages (that kept some of us riveted in place, missing bathroom breaks and lunch!) the intention is that WordCamp israel 2007 will be a one day event, focusing on blogging and wordpress as a blogging platform. We hope to get enough sponsorship to make the event free for all, or at least for no more then a symbolic fee. As we speak sponsors and do-gooders are actually lining up to help.
Some of the presentations already agreed upon include: Norms of freedom of speech in the israeli blogosphere, Business related blogging, SEO for blogs, Marketing with blogs and Blogs as information sharing medium in organizations. The wordpress experience will also include a presentation about the platform and an hands-on installation of wordpress, themes and plugins.
If you were wondering, here are some non scientific facts about Wordpress adoption in Israel:
Thanks to the work of several people which have done a great job in localizing the platform hunderd’s of blogs (at least!) migrated to the platform alongside many others that modded their own Heb-WP blog. Many themes and plugins have already been localized and adopted as well. Wordpress is now the blogging platform of choice for most self hosted Israeli blogs. Less then a year after its inception Blogli, a wordpress.com style MU based blogging site, has already had about 2000 blogs opened, which makes it the third largest blogging provider in israel
So, much has already been done but there is still much work ahead to make Wordpress (and blogging) as big in Israel as it should be. Hopefully, Wordcamp-Israel will push Israeli blogging further ahead.
If you wish to follow the developments, please subscribe to this RSS feed. We will have all news and itineraries available in English as things unravel so hang tight.
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