Digital Eve is a global organization for business women, with about 20 branches around the world. Most of the branches are in the US and Canada, and only three are international: Japan, the UK, and...you guessed it: Israel. The Israeli chapter of Digital Eve consists of a very active and professional email list with about 1500 subscribers. People use the list to get advice, find new employees and suppliers, and promote themselves and their own businesses. The list is moderated to maintain a high level of professional dialogue, and as a result it has become a favorite among the general Israeli business community, with many men joining as well and ...

A little over a week ago I spoke at the first F5-Refreshing meeting for Israeli women in the hi-tech and internet industry. Liat Vardi, the woman behind the group, did such a great job organizing the event, and it really fill a void in the Israeli hi-tech industry. You can see her follow-up post here. Kol hakavod Liat! I met some inspiring and fantastic women there, and learned about some interesting technologies. It is certainly motivating to see that success is possible for women in the Israeli hi-tech industry. Here is the presentation that I gave at the meeting on the topic of Blogs and SEO ...

Privacy by doc18 This week Emily Gould, former Editor at the mega-gossip-blog Gawker, published a stunning and moving description in the New York Times of her experience as a blogger who exposed all, both with regards to her own personal life, and those of celebrities. Her piece is fascinating and disturbing, and raises a lot of questions about the boundaries we set up and break down between our real-life identities, and those of our online personas. One of the questions that I'm often asked about blogging is about how far bloggers should go in exposing their private lives. This aspect of blogging makes people nervous, ...

I'm excited to announce the launch of a new course I'm giving on blogging and social media marketing strategies. About the course The new web, also known as web 2.0, is changing the way we communicate. With people spending more and more time online as active participants in the consumption and generation of content, companies and brands who wish to engage with online customers must adopt a new way of thinking. "Corporate Blogging and Social Media" is a 3-day seminar that will take place on Thursday June 5, June 12, and June 19, 2008. During the course, you'll gain a solid background in blogging and social media, start your own blog and write ...

We at illuminea try to encourage our clients to incorporate blogs into their websites since, in our opinion (and in the opinion of many others), the typical corporate website is not as effective as it could be. With content that rarely changes, and little to no engagement with clients and potential clients, traditional corporate websites are little more than online brochures, and do not utilize the power of the medium on which it sits: the web. Jeremiah Owyang, a Web Strategist with Forrester, wrote a great article on the topic called "The Irrelevant Corporate Website," explaining why the typical corporate website is increasingly ...

Commtouch, one of the world's leading email spam fighters, has now officially launched their new corporate blog, Commtouch Cafe, which was built by none other than...illuminea (i.e. us)! Founded in 1991 in Israel and publicly traded on the NASDAQ (CTCH), Commtouch's technologies help companies avoid the rising costs of email spam by constantly monitoring, identifying and blocking new malware attacks. To accomplish this, the company analyzes the distribution patterns of billions of email messages per month. That's quite a job. The new blog, called Commtouch Cafe, ...

More and more professionals are starting their own blogs. There is a growing realization that blogging can help advance a person professionally, or market a business. It helps establish them as thought leaders, create relationships with people they wouldn't normally connect to, and increase search engine rankings for their corporate sites. But it's hard to know where to start. Here are some tips that can help you start off on the right foot, so that you can grow as a blogger and head in the direction of becoming a "really professional blogger" (RPB): Really professional bloggers have self-hosted blogs. A self-hosted blog is a blog that is hosted on a person's own hosting account, as opposed ...

WordCamp Israel is over. It was fun and interesting, and you can read my complete review of the event over here. But, there is no rest for the weary, so it's on to the next event: this Tuesday I'll be giving a free workshop on using blogs as a marketing tool. Here's more info: The Oct. 30 meeting of the Yokneam Forum of Technical Writers (Elephant) will feature a workshop on "Using Blogging as a Marketing Tool". Meetings of the Forum are free and open to the public (most are technical or marcom writers, but others are welcome). The standard ...

Last night I went to my first iDrink event. For those of you who are not familiar with iDrink, it's a party/event for Israelis in the Internet and web industries. The format usually includes presentations by startups and sponsors of the event, some free drinks, and a lot of socializing and networking. This was their seventh event, and there were tons of people there. At first, we couldn't even get into the bar, and people were literally spilling out the door. But that was ok, cuz even the door was a social place to be. We got inside in time to hear/see the end of a presentation by a startup called ...

Yes, we've revamped our website, and it's about time! If you're reading this in a feed reader, come on over and check it out. Our old site was divided into two parts: one part was a static site built on old-fashioned HTML, and the second part was the blog, sitting separately on WordPress. There were a few problems with that setup: Updating the static site was not fun, especially if we needed to update elements that were repeated across the site, like the navigation bar, or the footer. The blog should have been tied into the site for better search engine results. The blog was sitting on a really old version of WordPress. It was the old story of ...