It looks obvious

Is it a decade already?
It is hard to remember the world without blogs. Now it is time to find some tools that help us sort through the flood of content.

It is August 31st again and it is Blog Day.  Writing, and mostly reading, blogs offer me a wider access for ideas and knowledge bypassing the traditional gatekeepers and editors. Therefore I’m finding it nice to dedicate a day in the year to recommend and compliment some of those blogs that made my world richer.

• Coyote Blog - I stumble upon this blog a while ago, looking for serious writing about the global warming and I found a real gem. The Coyote Blog covers variety of issues with sharp observation and in a way that making even complicated issues much clearer. 
• Cafe Hayek - My favorite economy blog, and not only because of the name. The writers,  Two George Mason University professors, prove that economy can make sense.
• Deep Space - This is a new blog written by a very dear friend. Catherine is a very talented writer who decided to try the blog format as a way to publish here wonderful writing. I’m anxious to see how this blog will develop, and I hope that many other will enjoy it as well.
• Ben Hammersley - Simply because his photography is like a beautiful poetry.
• PrezVid - The Presidential campaign as it is being run on YouTube. It is very interesting to see the increasing effort of the candidates to harness the Internet, and the new horizons the new tools open for political discussion.  

The Hebrew list will include, this year, the following:

• Zoolish - This blog, and its writer, are a proof that you can be very smart and yet wrong (or is it the other way around? ). I like reading Zoolish observations and analysis, although not agreeing with the conclusions sometimes.
• Friends of George - although I tried to avoid A-listing bloggers this is an obvious exceptions. This blog is written in a very charismatic way and with a rare intellectual honesty, which make it pleasure to read, even when I disagree with its observation or conclusions.
• Micro-Cosmos - Usually I have very little patience to young people, for many reasons, but this is an obvious exception. The blog offers a window that allow us to follow the development of a bright young man, and it is an interesting journey.
• The armchair school - a mix of technology, alcohol reviews and observation about life and politic. Well written.
• The true and shocking story of - Culture review the culture review should be.

Allison Kaplan Sommer is live blogging from the Israeli blogging conference, and had this wonderful insight:

I confess, I don’t read the Hebrew blogosphere with the exception of one personal friend. But there was just a woman up here speaking who was taking herself incredibly incredibly seriously. If there’s anything worse than a journalist taking themselves too seriously, it’s a blogger taking theirself too seriously. 

It reminded me what my sergeant in basic training once told me: "Don’t take it so seriously, after all it is just the army"…

Technorati Tags: Blogosphere, Israel, blogference

Mosif decided to infect the net across the ocean with the viral game in which a blogger tells when and how they discover the web and to invite five more bloggers to the confess how long are they Internet users. In the Israeli Blogsphare it developed rather nicely and produced very interesting posts.

In 1994, after few years in field units, I started to study at the Israeli Command and Staff Collage. As an organized person I decided that I need to finally join to the civilized world and write my future papers on a word processing software and therefore I needed to buy a computer. As an organized and motivated person I included in the new computer also a modem, the most advanced than - 14K per second, and started my addiction.

It took me a while to connect to the world wide web because the world of BBS’s was so rich, mostly for me who came from long time at the field, MSN was only a BBS - chats and forums - for subscribers from Israel, Also IOL (which doesn’t exist anymore) and another small one that had a limitation of few hours per user every day and had some celebrities like Sheli Yechimovitz (now a parliament member), Raanan Shaked and many others. But the most important use of the Internet was the ability to chat with than my girlfriend. Until I connected to the net we used to talk over the phone, and run pretty high bills, chatting online on MSN, and later using ICQ was a great deal of saving.

Now lets choose the next round of victims: Ingrid, Yaron, Yuval, Orli and last but not least the man that probably will be happy to block - or at least to regulate it to death the FCC chairman Kevin Martin.

Tags: Internet World Wide Web BBS Chat ICQ Blogsphare

If you are fond of smart, and funny, political and social satire I highly recommend this blog. Following the tradition of the the Jon Swift, the writer of his blog presents himself as:

Produce hilarious texts like this:

By the way, Idan use to do a good job translating some of Jon’s posts to Hebrew. I hope he will resume this practice.

Tags: Jon Swift Political Satire Blogs

The tagging game crossed the ocean and infected me. I have to apologize for the non-Hebrew readers of the blog (yes the two of you! ) for the links to Hebrew sites. The rules of the games are simple, once you are tagged you should tell five things your readers probably don’t know about you and tag five new bloggers.

well, lets begin the game:

Now lets send this game back to Israel to the next five victims:

Zoolish, Yaron , Eran , Avi and Tzvika

Technorati Tags: Blogosphare - Tagging Game