frgdr.com Blog

Jerusalem is expecting significant snowfall this coming Tuesday evening, and so the director of the Naggar School of Art, a client of mine, has asked for my advice on how to instantly update the school website so that students will know if there will be any classes Wednesday morning.
Good thing Web 2.0 was around to help us out: the Internet in its current phase enables different services to interface, that is exchange data with each other, and that allowed me to make one school director very happy, as he is now able to text snow status updates from his cellphone, allowing the students to receive automatic updates by SMS, RSS, or by simply visiting the school website.

Here is a cool video explaining Web 2.0. You may need to watch it a couple of times to absorb all the information:

 
 
The CommonCraft Show has great videos explaining different aspects of Web 2.0 in plain English, so anyone (Yes, even your mother) can understand.

If you want to find Shahar Golan / frgdr.com around Web 2.0 you can read his FAQ here.

I have already posted an elaborate list of the top annoyances plaguing the Israeli Internet^*, but wherever my mouse takes me I encounter more and more prototypical examples:

Let’s say you’re watching the film Rendition (2007), and you notice a breathtaking actress:

You wait until the movie ends, and by scanning the credit list you find out her name is Hadar Ratzon:

You come home from the cinema, and anxiously google it:

Of course you did not really expect to find an official HadarRatzon.com website, as that may cost up to ten (10!) dollars a year, but the first result is her agent and it seems promising:

Guess again! Three photos and a website error – this is all the information you get from the company that gets a significant percentage off her income. Could there be a better example to prove that Israeli companies do not consider the Internet a marketing tool, nor a knowledge acquisition tool?

^* For a lack of a better term, ‘Israeli Internet’ is what I call the ad-hoc collection of websites run by Israelis.

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Afterword:
Thanks to reader koko, I stand corrected. I must have been mesmerized by Fatima Fawal (Zineb Oukach) and her middle-eastern features, that when the credits rolled I mixed her up with Safiya (Hadar Ratzon). As koko suggested, Safiya is the lover and co-worker of Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal). Here is a frame of hers from the film:
And another one, just to make it up to her:
Either way, my critique of the Israeli Internet still stands – it just so happens that this entire post started by a case of mistaken identity.

You probably remember how addictive was rating girls on HotOrNot.com a while back. A recently launched NYC Jelly project compares website design by showing you a screen capture of two homepages at a time, and lets you pick the winner. It is the ultimate HotOrNot for geeks and it is called CommandShift3.

Besides being utterly addictive, it is a great way to check out the current Web2.0 trends. At this moment in time, these are the best and worst designed websites:

Israeli Knesset member Shelly Yacimovich has started using Snooz, the Israeli Twitter-wannabe, as another way to communicate her message to the masses.
While it is probably an aid that actually updates her status, there is something cool about getting RSS updates from a parliament member. Then again, the preposterous idea of communicating a message using one sentence is a sure sign of the times. Let’s see how long she can keep this up (currently 4 updates in 8 days).

How about updating her WordPress blog more often, instead?

I’ve been at the State Department for 30 years and there is no right answer to these questions and diplomacy needs all the words it can get its hands on.

– Asst. Secretary of State Albie Duncan (Hal Holbrook) - The West Wing TV Series