Those who participated in the conference last week may have seen Hanan Cohen walking around with his video camera asking people their names and the name of their blog.
Hanan has edited the results and put them up on YouTube. It's a nice snapshot of the Israeli Internet/blogging scene circa 2007. (And I say that not only because I make an appearance in the video).
Ooh, how far we've come with technology.
I'm sitting here watching Om Malik do a workshop here at the Blogference. Then, for kicks, I go to Flickr and search for "blogference" and find this picture of Om speaking to us.
Yesterday's post, which I wrote during the final panel session, actually generated a number of trackbacks even before the panel was over. Probably from other people watching the same panel. God bless our zero-time world.
Today was the first day of the Blogference, the international conference on blogging at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. The conference is a two-day affair, each day looking at the blogging phenomenon from a different perspective.
Today was the academic day, and was dominated by three panel sessions dealing with the political, psychological, and journalistic aspects of blogging. The psychological panel was quite fascinating. It turns out that there are a number of motivations for blogging in general, beyond the obvious of people who maintain a blog for personal reasons versus people who maintain a blog for professional reasons.
In the former, it turns out that the motivations for starting a blog (a desire to have one's voice heard and a need for exposure and recognition) are different than those for maintaining one (documenting one's life and discovering one's voice). Also, it turns out that a lot of people maintain a number of different online identities, having one blog that they show to people they know and another they write for a large audience of people they don't. And they tend to be more revealing for people they don't know.
The atmosphere here has been nice and relaxed today. Tomorrow's session tackles blogging from the more practical perspective, with the whole day filled up with workshops. As a reminder, I will be hosting a panel on the VC-Startup dialogue through blogs at 15:15.
Other than that, I had the pleasure of meeting Om Malik this morning. A very pleasant guy (He claims that Tel Aviv reminds him of Bombay. But in a good way). As well as the guys from Ask a Ninja and Rocketboom.
Next week, the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya is hosting an international conference on the subject of blogging. The conference will be held on July 1-2 (that's next Sunday-Monday) at the IDC campus. It will cover a wide range of topics both academic and practical.
The program features an impressive list of guests from abroad. Participating will be the great Om Malik, as well as the guys from Ask a Ninja, Jessica Ann Coen (late of Gawker), and Andrew Baron and Joanne Colan from Rocketboom.
I will be hosting a workshop/panel on the second day of the conference (Monday July 2). The subject of the workship os how VCs and startups can use blogging among other things to communicate between them. Joining me will be Aner Ravon (co-blogger of De Gardener), as well as Etay Naor and Tzvika Bessor who, among their various pursuits, are also in charge of the Internet.
The entry fee for the conference is quite low, so I invite everyone out there to come and see.
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