Well-know Israeli blogger  Miriam Schwab was among the myriad people who have had trouble getting authenticated to post comments on my blog (sorry), so I am posting this note for her re my interview with Ayelet Noth:

"I'm sure Ayelet didn't quite mean what it sounds like she said, but in any case I would like to point out that women can have kids and be very entrepreneurial. In fact, giving birth can (strangely) act as a catalyst for making sweeping and exciting changes in one's professional life.

I got married really young, and had a bunch of kids by the time I was 25/26. Not only did I not quit and park myself in my kitchen, each kid pushed me to make changes in my career. I had three kids while in university. After the third was born I decided to get my first real job. The next one led me to quit and start my own biz. The next led me to discover and explore the world of blogging and social media, and turn my business into a social media marketing service provider.

There is enough of a stigma in the workforce against women with kids, so we women should watch our words and make sure that it is very clear that we can have kids and careers. Actually, the fact that we have personal lives, I think, contributes to our value at work. We don't mess around (too much), and are very efficient and focused.

As someone once said to me: "if you ever need something done, ask a busy person." Women with kids are busy, and we'll get things done. "

I've gotten a number of informative emails from women bloggers and entrepreneurs in Israel who have point they want to make around the interview I did with Ayelet Noff last week. The red flag comment was--as I thought it  might be--was the following bit:

"Are there many women who do what you do?
No, not really.  For one thing, in Israel, many people marry and have babies by the time they are 25 or 26, so not everyone wants to be as entrepreneurial as me. Also, not everyone has the perspective I have; I'm Israeli, but I've lived around the world and am able to see different cultural and international points of view, particularly the American market; that and my fluency in English set me somewhat apart."

Since Moveable Type seems to have a hard time letting people register to comment(yes, I am addressing that), I want to post some of the feedback here--if you have comments and you have trouble posting, please reach out and I will post here.

One of the Israeli women who reached to me--and there seem to be many who feel Ayelet's point of view, while her own, didn't reflect their perspectives on women and tech in Israel, was
Or-Tal Kiriati, of www.lemino.com, who said

On the bus in Israel, I had a chance to hang over a more sustained chunk of time with Scoble and  Craig Newmark, two super well known bloggers (Scoble has1,600,000 links in Google; Craigslist has 28MM), and I learned something I didn't know before: these two A-listers are A-listers at least partly before they give some of the best customer service I've ever seen.

Yep, Scoble is online all the time with people who reach out to him: tweets, comments, trackbacks, posts. He pitches and catches with hundreds of people around the world, commenting and engaging in a way that means each person feel recognized.

And Craig, it's no different--Craig's passion is customer service, as he likes to say, and while a chunk of that is scrubbing the myriad forms of Craigslist, I'd bet he's just as committed to responding to the non-profits, the community folk, and the local folks who have something to say to him.

In other words, one of my take aways here is that these guys have intensified their stature through the one to one exchanges they have with people, and while these touches are not neccessarily visible, they make a huge difference in building and maintaining the connections.

Interestingly, I heard the same things about Mike Arrington from Israeli entrepreneurs when I was in Israel--Over and over again, Mike's name came up as someone people had spoken with, engaged with, learned from--so much so that I started to wonder how much Mike really sleeps.

In other words, in watching these folks in action, I realized while you build your reputation and your network through doing great blog posts, you can solidify and deepen it through true engagement with your audience, a lesson the best customer service reps--and the companies they support--have know for a while.

Even in a big world, human impulse is to make it smaller.

Valleywag may make derisive snorts about the "250," meaning the preening, self-congratulatory elitists they imagine as Silicon Valley's blogging core, but the truth is that the early adaptor crowd is really global, not local, and there's more like 3,500  of' em.

Having just spent a week in Israel with a gaggle of geeks, all using EVDO cards to stay connected on the travel bus, I observed a couple of things that I hadn't known before:

a) People from all over the world are talking to one another online, 24/7
b) Many of the people talking have formed strong ties and virtual communities.
c) Twitter is a key tool in supporting a & b, but blogs, friendfeed, IM, skype, email, and flickr all contribute as well.

During my week in Israel, I met folks, like the wonderful Orli Yakuel, who said she started techn blogging because of an influential blogger friend she'd met online, in the US; she and this person exchanged messages daily and had done so for a couple years.

At the same time, I saw Scoble, the most relentless and genial of bloggers, conduct conversations simultaneously with people all over the globe.

And I myself, of course, kept my my ties current and shared info daily with my friends and family in California, my business partner in Boston, and a whole gaggle of friends, family and colleagues in New York (and as I am now doing with a couple of people I met in Israel.)

The conclusion here, of course, is that it is human nature to make the world small.

Fueled by Twitter and skype, distances become smaller, discourses become more informal, and the global village gets larger, pulling us of us into the same virtual town.

The boy is late teens, handsome and fair, and his eyes are earnest as he talks: "In One Voice we don't call it peace anymore; we want to bring about an a agreement that will bring bout comfort and a more stable situation than they have now. It's not peace, it's divorce...the metaphor says now we are pre divorce and we need to balance the situation...this is the difference between one voice and the normal peace movement that talks about peace and friendship."

It's a weekend morning, in Tel Aviv and Craig Newmark, JD Lasica and I are meeting with the director and a group of student leaders from One Voice , a powerful, grassroots peace movement that has engaged Israelis, especially college students, from all over Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza, as well as drawn in members from the US, the UK, Canada, and other parts of the world. The group is bright, committed, and right now, engaged in making sure this group of American bloggers and funders (Craig is on their board), understands how they work and what they have to offer.

Basically here's what I learn:
The universities are flash-points for OneVoice recruitment, as are the occupied terrorities. The movement tries to educate through lectures and events, then recruits at various levels of engagement, from signing up for a newsletter (over 100K people in a country of 7 million) to attending events, to joining as an organizer.  For the students involved, One Voice clearly offers a change to discuss, a change to create change, but mostly importantly, a means to hope.
 
Here's some of what the students tell us:

Marina:  This movement involves the public so they can have an opinion for themselves and think about what they support.
 
Tal: We try to enrich student understanding with lectures and knowledge; we also take the message of OneVoice and careful optimism and take it out on the streets, where we want to mobilize the students and the city residents.

Another student: We ask citizens what would you do to end the conflict? People can become policy makers, instead of just consumers of policy
.
Talking with this group, they make it clear to me that what engages them so deeply is the feeling of being empowered in a frustrating situation where it is so hard to effect policy changes. Because OneVoice is a participatory culture, with youth councils, leadership councils, and local action, it provides a means for these bright engaged students to avoid dispair, as well as to educate and inform.

Listening to the talk flow around me, and seeing the passion in these fresh eyes, it strikes me that like the African National Congress (ANC) for South African Doris Lessing and her fellow progressives in Johannesberg, so long ago, OneVoice provides a means to survive and hang on in an impossible situation by becoming a force for positive change. It strikes me that OneVoice is a great group, not only for what it offers in terms of the conflict, but the positive vision it offers Israel and Arab youth, and through them, their parents, families and neighbors
.
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I'm back home; it's a nice day in the Bay area, and my body thinks it's evening tho my brain says midday. This of course will lead to the inevitable crashing out that jet lag often delivers.
Meanwhile, fellow Merry Travelling Geeks Crankster JD Lasica has published the very cool survey of the even cooler tools that the Bay area blogging crew on the israeli-based travelling geeks bus (and it was a very intimate bus) would confess to using.

People, that means you are about to hear what useful toys and shiny web implements Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, Craig Newmark and the rest of us fire up every day. Here are some highlights from the list.

• All 8 use Firefox, Facebook and Twitter.
• 5 use Friedfeed daily, 6 use flickr daily, and half said they used Gmail daily.
• Blogging software has the greatest fragmentation: some folks use multiple platforms, principally Typepad(5), Moveable Type (3), Word press (1, with one planning to switch.)

Most obscure (and retro) tools? SSH (secure shell)  & Pine (email client). Who? Uh, Craig.

On Tuesday, had a chance to talk with a broader range of Israeli women bloggers and tech VCs and entrepreneurs. Some pictures in advance of real words.

In some ways, spending this week in israel is overwhelming; there's just so much to absorb and assimilate, and I have so little context for it all. Sephardic traditions, Arab traditions, European traditions--I have no sense how they bump up against one another and how the big dose of American culture mixes it all up.

On another level, the tech world here--especially the web 2.0 corner--seems amazingly familiar.The passionate entrepreneurs, problem-solving engineers, and thoughtful VCs I'm meeting are all familar with Silicon Valley culture and building applications on a global scale (have to, Israel is such a small country).

Some of the start-ups teams that I've met that have me particularly energized include Pandora competitor and personalized music service meemix, where CEO Gil Shlang, Chief Scientist Dr. Ricardo Tarrasch and some kick ass musicologists/editors seem to be going at it the right way
.
Also impressed with the folks at  Work Light, where marketing guy Yonni Harif is building interest in a lightweight and secure application layer that can manage document access and security from within the Facebook environment (and all sorts of other cool things, including secure RSS).

And of course my friend and mobile entrepreneur  Eran Ahronson is inspiring..nothing like building one company after another..inspiring to see someone stay the course and be smart about it.

In other words, there is great start up energy here, with lots of eager developers, free floating VCs and all the talent to support that. (And are there many women-owned companies, especially technical ones? Hate to say it, but the answers seems to be...not.)

Note: Coming from Silicon Valley, it is interesting to see how knowledgeable everyone is
about our little bubble and how much the geeks we're meeting adore and respect Scoble. For them, he's both what the aspire to be and the man on the street--and he's just as gracious and engaged as can be, another inspiring lesson in focus. 

Talking with the spokesperson for Rambam, the big medical center for northern Israel; learning that there's a diversity here in staff--Druse, Moslem, Jewish, Christian--more pronounced than in some other areas; there are more Russians here than Arabs, the spokesperson says; you can see the northern border/frontier(Lebanon). The city is more secular than Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, there's lots of high tech and everyone goes to the beach (this is the hospital spokesman snapshot of the city.)

Like Palo Alto, the city has a high tech center, a big hospital and a technical university; there's a 2004 Nobel Prize winner in biochemistry--Faculty is also doing interesting work in regenerative medicine (like growing bones back...), as well as in treatment of stress and trauma (understandably, this is the border center...)

Listening to this preso, I understand how irrevocably I am a geek; prototyping medical instruments, treatments and protocols grabs my attention, even when the data is way outside my field; the whole process of exploration, analysis, testing, and development is always compeling.

We're also hearing their preso on "Medicine Under Attack" --there's a short film (and lots on the web)--The hospital was treating patients and under threat of missle attacks--this is a huge part of the historical memory of the place, and a history of which they are very proud in terms of the service they delivered.

(Susan sez: I'm a newbie visitor here, and yet I'm noticing that no one in the film is visibly Arab....am I being a total nickpicker to notice this? he staff is clear everyone participated in delivering care and was brave and comitted, serving the Gaza  and other areas as well as the city. Is it a valid observation? I have no idea--the dedication of the medical staff in the film, despite the terrible dangers, is amazing.)

(Added note: There's the wish to stay here and learn more, talk more, understand the moving stories, the great science, the lessons of war I know I don't understand at all, but there's no time for that today; this is a footnote in a lesson I have barely started to learn and may never full experience.)

And another note: This hospital keep giving service to the community and the soldiers 24/7 during the war--that is an amazing thing.)