Lorelle on blogging and Israel

Posted in WordCamp, blogging | Monday, October 15th, 2007 | Trackback

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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."

———————————————————

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.

A lot of blogs are written by people who can barely write let alone spell, by people who must not have a brain cell left in their head, and, indeed, we often think they must be crazy if they blog. After all, they are writing in their diary publicly, for everyone to see, and some laundry should not be hung publicly - you know what I mean?

While blogs have a generally bad reputation, the truth is that blogs are changing the world.

They change how we communicate, network, correspond, share, and tell our stories. Blogs are becoming sources not just for news around the world, but perspectives on that news. Instead of racing to the scene of an accident or event, some journalists are racing to the blogosphere to read what others are saving about the event.

While anyone can have an opinion, blogs offer a platform for sharing that opinion publicly with everyone around the globe.

No longer are we watching the events from around the world through our televisions. We are interacting with those involved or interested from all over the world. Just this week, visitors to my blog came from Malaysia, Russia, Israel, Pakistan, India, Venezuela, Columbia, Canada, UK, Sweden, Germany, Korea, Philippines, and Brazil. Do you know who is visiting your blog?

Businesses are using blogs in new and exiting ways. They are working harder than ever to create an air of "transparency", openness to what they are doing in their business. More than ever, economics is based upon "who you know" not just what. Blogs put a human face on a corporation.

Blogs are changing the advertising and marketing industry. It is no longer effective to put an ad on television, radio, or in print and expect people to flock to your product. Advertisers now understand that word-of-mouth means bloggers help spread the word about your product better than anything you can do.

And they can kill a product with that same word-of-mouth power instantly.

The written word is gaining importance around the world faster than it has ever done before. The only thing holding back the explosive changes the blogosphere is bringing is the big wall that stalls international communications: instantaneous translations.

Once that walls is broken down, imagine reading in live time blogs in Russian, Afrikaan, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Dutch, French, and Hebrew! No more barriers to information around the world. Blogs will open the door to what Boris is having trouble with at work in St. Petersburg, as well as to Paolo in Brazil.

If you aren't on the blogging carpet with us, look what you are missing that is coming our way!

Content Connections

In the first of my two programs at WordCamp Israel, I will be talking about the power of blogs to connect, to network, to socialize, and to build relationships. No blog is an island. We're all interconnected through our words and links.

Have you spent much time thinking about all these connections that can occur with your blog? You write and link to another blogger and a trackback appears on their blog. They know you said something about them and their blog post. They write about you, and their trackback appears on your blog. Someone’s talking about YOU!

Blogrolls, del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and so much more can be integrated into our blogs or used to promote and find content with our blogs, tying social networking and communication together with our own self-publishing empire: our blogs.

So what have you done lately to strength those content connections? Are you thinking "connections" and "networking" when you write a blog post? You should.

WordPress Tips

What brings us together October 25 in Tel Aviv is a love and passion for WordPress as well as blogging. As a long time contributor and editor of the , the online manual for WordPress Users, and a wide variety of WordPress tips for full version users, , and on , I've written more than my share about WordPress.

The latest version of WordPress brought built-in tags to your blog posts. This has created a lot of confusion over the relevance of categories and tags on your blogs, and which are more important. Are you having trouble understanding the differences?

There are a lot of wonderful WordPress Themes available for free, and yet many are missing some parts and pieces that you may not be aware of are missing. For example, I'm finding some WordPress Themes missing the next and previous post links, as well as next and previous posts links on multi-post page views. That makes it difficult for readers to dig deeper into your past posts. Have you checked your blog’s layout lately to see what is missing?

Many WordPress Themes remove the link to the blog post title on single post page views, which isn't a helpful thing to do to readers - want to know why?

There are also a lot of problems with writing blog posts, understanding how to paste in links, use heading tags, embed podcasts and images, and more that we can cover during the second program I'll be doing on WordPress Tips.

What do you want to know about WordPress? My WordPress Tips program will be an open forum for questions and answers, so get your questions ready.

To help get you in the WordPress mood, here are some links to WordPress tips I've covered recently.

Why Israel?

My husband and I have been , exploring the world and working along the way. Both of our jobs allow us to work anywhere in the world, and it was his job as an aeronautical engineer that brought us to Israel for a six month contract with Israel Aircraft Industries. Five years later, Netanyahu’s immigrant workers policy pushed us out of the country as our time was up. Who knows how much longer we would have stayed?

We lived through the bright days of open borders, freedom and economic expansion until 2000, when what should have been a joyous year of the millennium, turned into the "Situation". The dark days descended and we hung on through the Iraqi war, leaving a few days after Arafat was officially declared dead in France, an interesting time for leaving. We've explored all over Israel, diving in the Red Sea, birding in Eliat and the Galil, crawling through numerous caves, floating in the Dead Sea, relaxing in the Carmel Forest Spa, hiking along the Jordan and through the Golan, camping next to Masada in our tent, debating prices with glee in Yafo’s Old Market, climbing the hills of Jerusalem, and, of course, arguing, debating, and loving all our wonderful friends.

We taught many classes and workshops with ESRA in Tel Aviv and I'm eager to help bring attention to the power of blogging and WordPress to Israel. Israel is the ideal country for such social interchange, as its citizens understand the need for an open dialog and freedom of speech and exchange of information - probably better than any other country in the world.

Thank you to the sponsors and everyone for making it possible for me to be such a small part of this exciting conference. Don't forget, it’s your conference, too. You are the most important part of the program, so help me make it the best for you!

One Response to “Lorelle on blogging and Israel”

  1. WordCamp Israel - updates and tidbits | illuminea marketing & media Says:
    October 15th, 2007 at 11:27 pm

    […] Lorelle on blogging and Israel - Lorelle wrote this post specially for the WordCamp Israel English blog. It talks about blogging, and Lorelle’s past experiences in Israel. […]

Leave a Reply

FireStats icon Powered by FireStats