I think this is the first Blogging convention ever held in Israel, and as a blogger and participant it’s very exciting. IDC Herzeliya is hosting the 1st Blogference on July 1-2 (Hebrew site, English site), with an impressive list of guest bloggers, led by Om Malik, from GigaOm. Also coming to visit our small and very hot these last days (over 30 degrees C = over 90 F ) country, are Kent Alan Nichols & Douglas Sarine from Askaninja.com, Justin Kownacki from somethingtobedesired.com, Jessica Ann Coen from Vanity Fair magazine, Andrew Baron and Joanne Colan from rocketboom.com and others.
The convention will span 2 days and cover some philosophical/social/psychological questions during the 1st day (Sunday, July 1st), while the 2nd day (Monday, July 2nd) will be devoted to hands-on workshops, over 20 of them. The first day will host 3 different panels on the implications of blogging on our world, from various aspects. An interesting panel, which I’ll try to attend, is the 2nd one, entitled “The Psychology of Blogging”, presented by Dr. Amichai from IDC. Dr. Amichai has written a paper on the effects blog writing has on teenagers. Should be interesting to hear. On the 2nd day, workshop day, Eyal Levin (colleague from SWG) and myself will be speaking at the 3rd workshop that day, entitled “Next generation of communications and information management – Web logging as an inner organizations tool”. We’ll be speaking about IBM’s role in bringing web 2.0 to work, and some of our recently announced Software collaboration products, mainly Lotus Quickr 8.0 and Lotus Connections 1.0.
So, if you happen to come to Blogference on Sunday or Monday, stop by to say “Hi” – although we’re on cyberspace, “pressing the flesh” has never hurt anyone..
See you there 🙂
