(All the projects listed below are/were done voluntarily, independently and not for profit, in my (and my partners’) ever decreasing free time. Work related projects information can be found here)
Hebrew / Israeli Web projects
The Collective
A weekly come bi-weekly newsletter/email-link-blog I’ve been writing since late 1999, which, as far as I know, is the most widely read independent Hebrew email newsletter. Its eclectic, somewhat opinionated, contents cover web culture, design and a variety of other issues. Part Art & Letters Daily, part A-List-Apart, part Boing-Boing, part b3ta. With a motto roughly translated to “It’s quite something this Internet thing!”
Concept
Concept launched as a magazine and online gallery for digital culture, art and design, heavily influenced by k10k & A List Apart. As the years went by, we turned from a magazine into a launch-pad for net culture related projects. Some listed here.
Today Concept’s magazine does not update, and we spend our time working on various other projects. The site still has a highly successful breaking news feature, as well as a job board serving the Israeli new media industry free of charge.
We recently started using BaseCamp [affiliate link], which revolutionised the way we coordinate our volunteers. I plan to write a post about it in the near future.
Concept won (and was short-listed) several “site of the year” competitions, and also the “Volunteering badge of merit” from the Israeli Internet Society (ISOC-IL) & the National Volunteer Council
Concept Live / BD4D TA:
We took upon ourselves to curate and produce the Tel Aviv BD4D (By designers for designers) events. Three events so far, and the success has been overwhelming. Attendance was above most of BD4D events in far bigger cities. The last event took place on April 2004, at Zavta, one of Tel Aviv’s most prominent live event venues with over 400 tickets sold(out) in advance.
Notes.co.il
Launched in the summer of 2003, Notes is a Hebrew blogging platform with a twist. The Israeli blogosphere works differently than the rest of the world (I hope to write about that sometime soon). At the time we were starting to think about it (not anymore, mind you), we saw that most of the blogs in Hebrew were personal journals (mostly) belonging to teenagers. As a result, many experienced writers, who were starting to think about creating internet presence, were missing the blog phenomena, or were actually “snubbing” blogs. In order to bring them “aboard the revolution” we decided to create Notes as an exclusive site, only excepting writers with a definite focus and proven experience in their field. As a result, Notes today holds the densest collection of blogging professionals, journalists, academics, artists etc, in Hebrew.
Standards
A “propaganda site” promoting the benefits and importance of writing web code that comply to web standards. This is even more of a challenge with sites in Hebrew, and with a lot of bad heritage code going around. Nowadays, many leading Israeli sites have made great strides, maybe not fully standardized, but at list non-explorer friendlier. We’d like to think we took a small part in making that happen.
We have more projects coming soon, and I’ll update them as they come.
Non-web projects
College course
“Marketing Communications and the Cultural Field” was an advanced course I gave as an adjunct lecturer at the Camera Obscura School of Media and Art in Tel Aviv, it was born out of an ambition to empower creative people to deal with marketing, marketers and “The Industry” by creating a bridge between the creative disciplines and marketing communications, using theory as a “common grammar” but emphasising the practical applications/manifestations in current marketing practices. It proved quite popular.
Dimona & Comics
Dimona is a group of five comix creators in their late twenties who live and work in Tel-Aviv, Israel. The group members use the comics medium to tell stories about their own life and fantasies, in a wide and non-traditional variety of styles and media, very different from American “super hero” comic books. The 3rd volume of the Dimona group anthology has come out in 2005, along with a stand alone graphic novella, entitled “Shirley – a sex comedy”.
I’m the story editor of the these two books, which evolved during a comics storytelling and script-writing workshop conducted with the group. I have been studying the narrative aspect of comics for many years, reading voraciously about the subject of visual storytelling and combining my insights as a reader with existing concepts taken from semiotics & narratology, hacked to fit that medium.
The rhetorical mechanics of comics as a narrative medium was the subject of my (uncompleted) thesis. Since I left the academy to focus on other areas, I’ve occasionally lectured and published on the subject.
