Fili’s world

From the Israelated FAQ :  

Q : What is Israelated ?

A : Israelated is a community for independent English Israeli related blogging. Israelated provides Israelated bloggers a platform to share links to their blogs' posts and to provide people interested in Israelated matters a community to find and discuss Israelated blogging information.

Q : How does Israelated work? 

Israelated provides a steady stream of news by English-language bloggers who write about Israelated issues or by English-language Israeli bloggers. Readers are able to skim the headlines of all the major local blogs, and bloggers should enjoy a wider audience and at least a modest increase in their site's traffic.

Only registered users may submit blogs to Israelated. Please limit submissions to blogs that are primarily related to Israel, Israeli culture, Israeli life or Israelis.

This site only provides links to other blog sites provided by registered users. We do not take any responsibility for the content displayed on the site in any way. In order to protect bloggers copyrights on their information we encourage users to post summary blog-feeds only and we ask that users make sure the URL they submit is indeed their own blog's feed (RSS or ATOM). Blog feeds will be removed from Israelated at the request of their owners if submitted by other users.

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On the 23/08/2006 Hanan Cohen, the website owner of Webster , gave an interview to the Israeli online newspaper NRG. To those not familiar with Webster - Webster was Cohen's personal online news-aggregator which, in time, has turned into the number 1 source for Israeli blogging on the web. In that interview Hanan Cohen talked about freezing new additions to his Webster aggregator (loosly translated from Hebrew) :

"Hanan Cohen explains that Webster has become a public institution, which has made his responsibility for adding new feeds unbearable.

'I formed Webster because I wanted to get people interested in independent writing on the net as a kind of a public service.  I added non-commercial sites with quality writing that I thought would interest people, not only myself' he says to NRG.

'Because it was so popular, I've become a public figure and Webster has become a standard' says Cohen. "Eventually, it limited me, and I felt it was too much. The decisions I had to take were problematic, because of the power that I had, which was monopolistic'.

On his blog he writes - 'as long as there is no real competition to Webster, I'm freezing the site. I will not add or remove any feeds and will no longer work on the code'.

'I do not want people to rely on me on finding the interesting blogs, I want other sites to expose new interesting information to the public.'"

For me, reading about it through the Israeli blog xslf.com I was immediately interested in that challenge. I went further to read other posts in Cohen's blog with some thoughts about who Webster is for and I did some Google searching - only to find what I considered irrelevant solutions for the Israeli blogsphere problem :

• Shave Kriaa (meaning "worth reading" in Hebrew) is a Digg/Pligg clone.
• Guy West installed another Digg like clone .  Guy West admits it himself that Digg/Pligg clones are not the right solution.
• Ozrox and Kaveret still have exactly the same problems as Webster.

And then it occurred to me … based on the tools I've seen and used in my blogging years and the portals that I've seen and been involved with I might have a better solution for the Israeli blogsphere problem.  I took some time off from the time off I was taking in London to set up an alternative to the English Webster called "Israelated".

True, I'm biased, since I'm an Israeli blogger writing in English, hence this first platform is for the those writing Israelated material in English, but if this is successful then maybe someone will help extend this platform into Hebrew. After all - it's no big deal, and I'll give all the help I can.

So, I invite all the bloggers who are Israelated to join up the Israelated community at http://www.israelated.com  . Hopefully, this experiment will work well. It already has some successful implementations around the world.