We Blog The World

Finally had a chance to edit and upload two videos from our Silicon Valley blogger trip to Israel in April. A visit to a Bedouin Arab home from JD Lasica on Vimeo. A visit to a Bedouin Arab home Here’s a 3 minute 45 second chat with Muhammad Khaldi in Khawalid, a Bedouin Arab village in northern Israel, and his son Ishmael Khaldi, who is the deputy consul of the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest in San Francisco. We had the talk during a visit to the Khaldi home by a group of 10 Innovation Israel bloggers from the San Francisco Bay Area. Both Ishmael and Deborah Schultz interpret Muhammad’s remarks from Arabic into English. Watch the video in H.264 on Ourmedia Watch the video in Flash on Vimeo An Arab Israeli’s journey from JD Lasica on Vimeo. An Arab Israeli’s journey Here’s a 13-minute video capturing a story by Ishmael Khaldi, who is the deputy consul of the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest in San Francisco, during a trip to his home in Khawalid, a Bedouin Arab village in northern Israel. Ishmael recounts his first visit to the United States when he came…

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Social marketing expert Ayelet Noff talks about the social media and Web 2.0 scene in Israel during this 9-minute video interview I conducted with her during our blogger posse road trip to Israel. A former New Yorker, Ayelet is a rising star in Web 2.0 circles in Tel Aviv and helped us with all phases of our trip. (Apologies for the lighting — this was the first interview I did on my Samsung hi-def camcorder.) Watch video in H.264 MPEG-4 on Ourmedia Watch in Flash on Ourmedia Watch video in Flash on Veoh (with ads)

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Just finished uploading the last of more than 140 photos I took in Israel last week, including a few dozen shots of Old Jerusalem and the Western Wall. (Some videos still to come.) Some parting thoughts about our Innovation Israel trip: • When 10 Bay Area bloggers come together in a fast-paced weeklong expedition to a country 10 time zones away, interesting things happen. Like old friendships renewed, and new friendships that take quick root. And the camaraderie that ensued when 12 of us jam our bodies and wifi connections into a tiny van that served as a makeshift blogger bus. Or the fashionably geeky late-night parties or quiet escapes to the nearby beach. • I’ll always feel indebted to the people who went out of their way to act as gracious hosts in this fascinating new land, particularly Ayelet Noff, who introduced us to dozens of people in Web 2.0 circles, and Ishmael Khaldi, who introduced us to his Bedouin family and neighborhood. • Greatly enjoyed meeting the high-tech pioneers we met everywhere up and down the country. • Once we left the hotel, the food was great. • We owe a debt of gratitude to the consulate officials…

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The favorite person I met in Israel was Ayelet Noff, who writes a social marketing blog at Blonde 2.0. I’d been following Ayelet’s blog for months, and I conducted a video interview with her that I’ll post soon. What came as a surprise was how solicitous and helpful she was in helping organize several events, such as the great bloggers dinner at Mandy’s along the Yarkon River. (We both share a dislike of unorganized affairs.) Susan Mernit conducted a quick Q&A with her during our visit, and I’ll excerpt parts of it here: A former New Yorker, Ayelet is one of those bi-cultural Israelis who grew up in the US and then moved back. Fluent in English and seemingly effortlessly bi-cultural, Ayelet offers a much need broad perspective to the high-tech start-ups that seek her counsel–she offers advice on product development, marketing, partnerships and brand positioning; my sense is she often provides a valuable and more savvy focus to Israeli teams wanting to reach a global market. In addition, Ayelet is a born connector; she truly knows everybody and relishes introducing people to one another; the dinners, meet-ups, coffees and conversations she helped created for the Travelling Geeks crowd on…

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I haven’t done this before, but I thought it would be interesting to list the names and affiliations of many of the people I met during the Innovation Israel trip to Israel last week. Old-fashioned business cards still come in handy: Ido Aharoni, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Akiva Tor, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Shirin Ezekiel, project manager, Asper Institute for New Media Diplomacy David Ratner, spokesman, Rambam Health Care Campus Nurit Naeh, director of PR, Rambam Alex Sirota, co-founder and CTO, foxytunes Eliezer Yaari, executive director in Israel, New Israel Fund Niv Calderon, WiserCodes, Inc. Kfir Pravda, Pravda Media (stories without boundaries) Monica Cohenca, foreign relations coordinator, Globes (Israel’s business newspaper) Isaac Shenberg, senior VP, Business Dev, Zoran Laurent Haug, founder & CEO, LIFT Lab (Geneva) Iri Amirav, chief marketing officer, iMedix Barak Hachamov, founder & chairman, my6sense.com Ayelet Noff, social marketing strategist, Blonde 2.0 Eyal Niv, managing director, Giza Venture Capital Gil Shamy, executive director, OneVoice – Israel Guy Eliav, CEO, blogTV.com Yarden Leal, project manager, Peres Center for Peace Yael Patir, assistant to director general, Peres Center for Peace Ushi (Asher) Krausz, IT Peace Projects Unit, Peres Center Zvika Netter, CEO & co-founder, InnoVid (In Video Advertising Real…

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On Thursday, our last full day in Israel, we dashed from school to nonprofit to one of Israel’s top corporate success stories. I was busy taking photos, so here are some of my notes, with pointers to longer writeups. Bialik-Rogozin School One of the week’s most touching visits came during a stop at the multicultural Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv. (Read here about how how the school is helping Darfur refugees escape genocide.) The school enrolls 726 students, chiefly children of immigrants and migrant workers. The children, ages 5 to 16, hail from 29 countries, such as the Philippines, Nigeria and 33 who escaped killings in the Darfur area of Sudan. “It’s the only place where the kids feel safe and are accepted regardless of their background,” an official told us. The school has an extraordinary agreement with the immigration police not to raid the school for undocumented immigrants. They’ve worked with the Israeli government to get citizenship for 230 of the students so far. “Hiding kids in a Jewish state is someting that is very loaded,” said Yossi Vardi, creator of the pioneering instant messaging program ICQ, who insists on not receiving recognition for his philanthropic contributions to the…

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One of the stranger juxtapositions on the Innovation Israel trip came on Wednesday when our blogger posse spent a few hours taking a guided tour of Old Jerusalem. I spent the entire time taking photos in RAW format with my new Nikon D300 digital camera (haven’t had time to read the 300-page manual, so mostly winging it). We visited the Western Wall (no longer the Wailing Wall, by the way) and the city’s Arab marketplace. I hope to post some pretty good shots this weekend. Cathy Brooks has a poignant account of our trip to the old city here, and Jeff Saperstein contrasts Jerusalem with Tel Aviv here. Afterward, we headed to Israel’s premier venture capital firm, JVP in Jerusalem, which funds early stage companies — they’ve funded between 20 to 40 to date. Can’t tell you a whole lot because the three JVP-backed startups that we met are all in stealth mode with public betas due out this fall. It won’t give away anything to mention that one of the three involves 3D avatars (like 20 other companies I know) based on photos you upload. Not just any photo, but celebs like Bruce Willis, too. I asked the team…

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We’re winding up our Innovation Israel tour of Israel’s tech community today, and I’m in awe of some of the Silicon Valley alpha geeks I’ve been traveling with this week. (Here’s our group blog: Travelinggeeks.com.) Especially loved spending quality time with Robert Scoble, Susan Mernit, Cathy Brooks, Sarah Lacy and Deb Schultz. So I thought you might want to take a peek at some of the software applications and Web 2.0 tools (on the Web and on the desktop) that these folks use on an almost daily basis. Sorry, no hardware comparison; Scoble would win hands down. Robert Scoble Scobleizer Firefox (web browser) FriendFeed (social media sharing) Google Reader (RSS news reader) Techmeme (a tech news dynamic link aggregator) Twitter (social network) GoogleTalk (live chat on Windows) Gmail (email) WordPress (blog software) Flickr (photo sharing) Skype (communication) Facebook Qik (live video streaming and hosting) iTunes (music) TweetScan (Twitter add-on) There’s more, but those are the main ones. Craig Newmark Craig from craigslist’s blog Firefox SSH (secure shell) Pine (email client) TypePad Twitter (“curse you, Robert Scoble!”) MovableType (blog software of Huffington Post and MyBarackObama.com) SmugMug (photo sharing) YouTube Bloglines (RSS reader) Skype iTunes Susan Mernit Susan Mernit’s blog FriendFeed Twitter…

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Ten bloggers and citizen journalists are on a weeklong Innovation Israel tour, chiefly to Israel’s high-tech sector. It’s my first time in Israel. We have a high-stress, fast-paced agenda every day, with lots of people, companies and travel sites to visit. It appears that I’ll be: Blogging here when I get the chance. Posting photos to the Israel set of Flickr. Twittering when on the run. Publishing video interviews after I return next week. Tweaking the Travelinggeeks blog I put together last week with a huge amount of help from Chad Cappelman. I wrote on the PBS IdeaLab blog about some of the interesting social interactions in this experiment in mobile citizen media. At the moment, 12 of us are traveling in a “blogger bus” from Tel Aviv to Haifa in the north. We’re extremely grateful to Israel’s Foreign Ministry for putting us up (except for Robert Scoble, whose fare is being paid by FastCompany) and for Cellcom Israel Phone for setting us all up with 3G Sierra AirCard wireless modems and cell phones for making local calls. Also, Flixwagon and Meemix sponsored a bloggers dinner for us. Zoran: a fascinating Israeli chipmaker First stop on our weeklong tour of…

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Man, this is a crazy way to blog (on a blogger bus in Israel with a deputy consul talking in a Hebrew dialect on his cell phone in my ear). On Sunday afternoon, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (who is on OneVoice’s board of advisors), Susan Mernit and I met with seven leaders of the Israeli branch of OneVoice, Roi, Noam, Gil, Sara, Yanna, Tal and Marina. I conducted a brief video interview with the head of the Tel Aviv office of the organization and will post that next week. The group, at Onevoicemovement.org, now has 630,000 members in Israel and the occupied territories — Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians — with a presence in the United States, Canada and Great Britain as well. They have offices in Tel Aviv, Gaza and Ramallah Some snippets from our conversation: Executive Director Gil Shamy told us, “It’s a mass movement of moderates” who are seeking to find common ground for a just and lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The effort is less a political effort seeking specific legislative action than a broad-based social movement that is seeking to find common ground. A hard-edged realism This is not a traditional peace…

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