Some posts from “the news & telegraph“, a blogger at Israel’s Blogference over at the IDC. A cool two day event, which of course we weren’t invited to:

Blogference 2007

I’m at the IDC Herzliya, about 30 minutes north of Tel Aviv, where the Sammy Ofer School of Communications is hosting Israel’s first conference on blogging, the “Blogference 2007.” The InterDisciplinary Center Herzliya is an interesting new phenemonon in Israel—it’s the first private university in Israel and is really cutting edge. We got a tour of the communications school yesterday, which is only a year old, and has about 100 students (the whole school has about 800). They’ve got some incredible production facilities here and some impressive radio and audio editing suites, better than most newsrooms I’ve ever been in.

I spoke yesterday (below) on journalism and blogging and the challenges of the proliferation of media sources and points of view. Then today I spoke about the thesis of my book about the transformative technologies coming to play in the 2008 presidential race.

I’ve also sat in some discussions of the Russian blogosphere, the Israeli blogosphere, and then a great film-making and online video panel by the the Askaninja.com guys. The conclusion of the Russian discussion? A blogosphere is no substitute for democracy.

Blogging in the Holy Land

I’m in Tel Aviv this week for Israel’s first blogging conference. I was one of a half-dozen U.S. bloggers invited to come speak at the conference, since the U.S. blogosphere is a few years more advance than Israel’s right now.

We arrived on Friday evening and spent yesterday hanging around our hotel right on the Mediterranean yesterday. It’s just so beautiful here; I can’t get over it. I don’t know what I was expecting for Tel Aviv, but this certainly wasn’t it. The beach, which stretches most of the length of the city, is incredible. Since yesterday was the sabbath, it was absolutely packed. We walked down a bit from the hotel and there are chaise lounges all set up — for 12 shekels, about three dollars, you can “rent” a chaise lounge for the day. Then they have waitstaff on the beach who serve drinks and food. I have to admit that we were sipping pineapple daiquiris by 10 a.m. yesterday.

Yesterday afternoon, we visited Old Joffa, the ancient port, and wandered around for a while. There wasn’t much to see given how everything was closed. Then last night we had dinner on the waterfront in the marina before heading over to the old port, which has been resurrected as a fancy nightclub and restaurant district. It was very hip, lively, and colorful.