The News & TeleGraff

The Giant Interweb

I said over dinner last night that I'm totally in love with the internet, but since that alone doesn't seem like that big of news, let me explain: In the last week I've had a host of experiences that heralded to me just how much the internet and specifically "Web 2.0," is changing our lives and just how deep and wide its impact is.

When I returned from Israel last week, I talked to my book editor who said that he'd heard from his assistant (with whom I'm friends on Facebook) that the conference had gone well because, thanks to the Facebook Newsfeed, she noticed I had gotten a whole host of new friends out of it. Then last Wednesday, when it was birthday (which was announced on the homepages of all of my Facebook friends), I must have gotten close to thirty emails or Facebook Wall messages from friends around the country with whom I'm not in regular contact. Last year, before Facebook really took off, that number was much much smaller.

Over the weekend, I posted all of my photos from Israel to Flickr, the first time I've seriously used that site. Mostly I just post photos to my own website here. This time, I took the time, though, to tag and title all the Israel photos and post them—and then yesterday I got an email from "Gifted Gourmet," a Flickr user, who runs the Olive appreciation group on Flickr (technically called "Olives, the gift of the gods from Roman times to today") and had noticed that I had a photo of olives in a Tel Aviv street market. She asked me to add my photo to her group.

Then later yesterday I was emailing with a colleague who explained that she met her "boyfriend" online when he started reading her blog—they've never actually met and won't until November (he's a soldier serving in Iraq actually) but they exchange emails each day.

What an odd odd world we live in today. It's pretty exciting to watch this all evolve.

#38

About three years ago, I made a list of the things I wanted to do in life. In total, I came up with about 80 different goals, some travel-oriented, some professionally-oriented, some family-oriented, and some life-oriented. Some were pretty ambitious (See the darkness of space) and others entirely frivalous (spend a night gambling in VegaS). Creating the list was a big factor in me leaving politics and consulting behind because I realized that my current path wasn't really getting me any closer to my goals. Since 2004, I've knocked off five, including visiting Alcatraz to flying in a helicopter, and added a few more to the list.

Today I knocked off #38: "Swim in the Dead Sea." In our only free day in Israel, me and the ninjas, the only other two remaining members of our group, drove the two hours down to the Dead Sea region, through the desert outside Jerusalem, passing many goat- and sheep-herding Beduoin communities as well as several Israeli police and military checkpoints.

The gondola ride up to Masada, where it was in the low-100s.

We spent the early part of the afternoon at Masada, an ancient palace built by King Herod and then later, under the Romans, the scene of a lengthy seige where the last Jewish rebels held off the Romans for months until on the verge of defeat they committed mass suicide rather than face slavery. To this day, the scene has a unique importance in Jewish and Israeli culture—Israeli soldiers are sworn in here with the words "Masada shall not fall again."

Afterwards, we went over to Mineral Beach, where we went for a quick swim. It was amazingly fun; I've heard people talk about the prospect of just floating in the Dead Sea but that doesn't really capture just how cool it is. You really just float. You can't get under the water even if you wanted to. It's so buoyant and swimming is a breeze because there's no real resistance. We rubbed ourselves down with the famous mud and learned a valuable lesson: Using an abrasive mud and then swimming in very salty water can be quite painful.

People floating in the Dead Sea. Off in the distance is Jordan.

It was also REALLY hot. At Masada, which is about 50 meters above sea level, and at the Dead Sea, which is about 400 meters below sea level, you could feel the intense heat. The temperature was well over 100 degrees, but our guide explained that it can often range up towards 115.

Anyway, number 38 is done. At the rate I'm going I've got many decades ahead of me.

Reporting Live from the Gaza Border

My perspective on Israel and its tenuous situation in the world radically changed today as our helicopter took off from the airport in Herzliya. You could look left and see the Mediterranean and look right and see the West Bank—at that point, the “waist of Israel,” the country is amazingly narrow.

We flew east right to the West Bank border, following the relatively new security fence south towards Jerusalem, which is about an hour’s drive by car away from Tel Aviv. Skimming the mountains at 120 mph, we covered the distance in much less.

Jerusalem's "Old City" and the Temple Mount.

We flew right over Jerusalem, which we’ll get to see on the ground tomorrow, circling the Temple Mount and the white Old City—all of Jerusalem is built out of limestone, which is very prevalent here. Then we picked up the security fence again and headed south.

We landed in Sderot, a city of 23,000 that I knew almost nothing about before arriving. As one of the Ninjas summed up the trip, “Oh, some things we forgot to tell you before you’re in missile range: Number one, you’re in missile range.” Evidently Sderot, the only Israeli town on the border of Gaza, has been under near-constant bombardment from Qassam rockets, a small inaccurate “domestically manufactured” weapon shot over from Gaza. They’re not much different than bottle rockets, except for the presence of explosives and more power. Since 2001, over three thousand have hit Sderot, often five to ten a day most days. On the morning we were there, one landed in town around 6 a.m. They are mostly fired in the mornings and afternoons during commuting hours.

We traveled by bus to the Gaza border and an observation post named Nebbi Meri, after (we learned later) an Israeli colonel killed on that spot by a sniper. We looked down into the Gaza city of Bayt Hanoun, where most of the rockets come from, and watched the IDF patrol the fence.

Me on the border with Gaza.

Then we went into back the city of Sderot, saw a synagogue that had been hit by a Qassam a few weeks ago, and went to the police station where the most recent Qassams are stored. They filled an entire wall of the station parking lot, each rocket dated and many of them painted. The colors represent which faction’s rocket it is: Green and red, the colors of Palestine, means Hamas or Fatah, whereas yellow rockets mean the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

One of yesterday's Qassams (note the date).

An odd sidenote today was that we covered most of the major sights of Ariel Sharon’s career: We saw the plains of Latrun in 1948, where he was wounded in battle; his giant red-roofed ranch Havat Hashikmim in southern Israel where his wife is buried; the Temple Mount, where his visits supposedly touched off the second intifada; the Knesset, where he served for many years; Hadassah Hospital, where he was taken when collapsed in January 2006; and ended the day at Sheba Medical Center, where from the nearby street you can see the room, with the curtains drawn, where he still lies today.

The whole journey was all just too much for me to process. Gaza for me has always been just a headline to me. Standing there today, looking down on the dusty border, the massive observation posts (reinforced after terrorists kidnapped Col. Gilad Shalit during an attack on one post last year), and the area where the BBC’s Alan Johnson has been held for more than a hundred days, really brought home the situation to me.

I ended the afternoon floating in the Mediterranean outside our hotel, which is only some 72 km north of Sderot, but an entirely different world. Tonight we met with the Israeli filmmakers who put out the movie “The Bubble,” about life in Tel Aviv, and I can see how people refer to the city as a bubble. It’s really an oasis in a very tense and difficult situation, but there’s no real way to live here without not worrying. These things are just an aspect of life here.

Some of my photos from the day are below.

UPDATE: Hooray! Johnson has been released!

The security fence along the West Bank from the air.

After landing in Sderot.

IDF on patrol.

The damaged synogogue, hit last month by a Qassam.

The Qassam stockpile at the Sderot police station. Note the colors.

The Tel Aviv waterfront, peaceful and beautiful.

The Tel Aviv sunset tonight over the Mediterranean.

Blogference 2007

I'm at the IDC Herzliya, about 30 minutes north of Tel Aviv, where the Sammy Ofer School of Communications is hosting Israel's first conference on blogging, the "Blogference 2007." The InterDisciplinary Center Herzliya is an interesting new phenemonon in Israel—it's the first private university in Israel and is really cutting edge. We got a tour of the communications school yesterday, which is only a year old, and has about 100 students (the whole school has about 800). They've got some incredible production facilities here and some impressive radio and audio editing suites, better than most newsrooms I've ever been in.

I spoke yesterday (below) on journalism and blogging and the challenges of the proliferation of media sources and points of view. Then today I spoke about the thesis of my book about the transformative technologies coming to play in the 2008 presidential race.

(photo by Niv Calderon)

I've also sat in some discussions of the Russian blogosphere, the Israeli blogosphere, and then a great film-making and online video panel by the the Askaninja.com guys. The conclusion of the Russian discussion? A blogosphere is no substitute for democracy.

Blogging in the Holy Land

I'm in Tel Aviv this week for Israel's first blogging conference. I was one of a half-dozen U.S. bloggers invited to come speak at the conference, since the U.S. blogosphere is a few years more advance than Israel's right now.

We arrived on Friday evening and spent yesterday hanging around our hotel right on the Mediterranean yesterday. It's just so beautiful here; I can't get over it. I don't know what I was expecting for Tel Aviv, but this certainly wasn't it. The beach, which stretches most of the length of the city, is incredible. Since yesterday was the sabbath, it was absolutely packed. We walked down a bit from the hotel and there are chaise lounges all set up -- for 12 shekels, about three dollars, you can "rent" a chaise lounge for the day. Then they have waitstaff on the beach who serve drinks and food. I have to admit that we were sipping pineapple daiquiris by 10 a.m. yesterday.

Yesterday afternoon, we visited Old Joffa, the ancient port, and wandered around for a while. There wasn't much to see given how everything was closed. Then last night we had dinner on the waterfront in the marina before heading over to the old port, which has been resurrected as a fancy nightclub and restaurant district. It was very hip, lively, and colorful.