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WordCamp Israel

Good morning from Tel-Aviv !

I’ll be attending WordCamp Israel in a couple of hours and giving a quick presentation as well. I’ll update this post later in the day with the slides and hopefully some video footage too.

update: Great seeing everyone and hope my presentation was helpful.  We don’t have the video yet, but below is the Keynote/PPT using Slideshare.  I also generally go more visual on the slides with a photo and just a word or two, but knowing that I was going to embed it, I made it a bit more verbose.

( Download PDF version of the presentation & a cool visual representation of the presentation by dibau naum h on flickr plus the WordCamp Israel 2008 flickr pool )

Also a few things people at WC Tel Aviv didn’t seem to know about that are helpful:

Thanks to Tal, Noa, Elad Salomons, and Itai Nathaniel and all the organizers and volunteers for a great WordCamp.

WordCamp Israel 2008

WordCamp Israel will be held this year on November 16th, 2008 (english language link).

Already 250+ people have registered and looks like it will be a great event. I plan on attending and helping out where I can.

The focus this year is:

…to discuss the usage of WordPress as a tool for social change and community involvement, and to strengthen the connection between the WordPress community and non-profits.

Additional goals of the conference:

  • To strengthen the ties between Israeli WordPress users
  • To grow the Israeli WordPress community
  • To increase people’s technical understanding of WordPress

As many of you know, these kinds of events are only possible with the hard work of volunteers and the generosity of sponsors. If you are interested in either drop a note to info@wordcamp.co.il.

[ WordCamp Israel ]

PollDaddy

Exciting news – PollDaddy has joined the Automattic team.

The timing is great since the Automattic team is in the mountains of Colorado at our bi-annual company meetup, and we’ve all been able to get the know the talented PollDaddy team of Lenny and Eoin.

From my earlier days at TIME.com I’ve known that polls were huge and that readers loved particiapting.  This has been echoed in the WordPress world with very popular WordPress plugins for polls.  I’m including my quick poll here:

As Matt mentioned in his blog post, in terms of integration, “we just enabled PollDaddy with 4.4 million blogs on WordPress.com and have also released the first version of their .org plugin.”

Check out the screencast below for how to add a poll on WordPress.com:

TechCrunch50 and Israeli Companies

Israel Makes Strong TC50 Showing:

Israel seems to have been the country with the single biggest foreign contingent at TC50 with no less than 6 of the 50 companies presenting on stage. Some more Israeli startups could be found in the demo pit, the exhibition space and just walking around the venue floor shopping for investors, customers and partners.

Plus the demo pit winner iamnews makes 7 out of 52 total I believe.  Pretty impressive !