Those percentages mean that if you haven’t already started your own blog or website, chances are good that you will at some point – because as someone with something to say, you probably won’t be satisfied remaining someone’s “employee,” and will likely want to be your own boss. Especially when you find out how much money the person you’re writing for is actually earning from the site (it’s probably more than s/he’s telling you).

Fortunately, there is an easy way for you to get a very professional looking blog – indistinguishable from a “website,” if you feel the need to differentiate between the two – that will cost you little or nothing, depending on how much work you put into it. How? By using Wordpress to build your sites.

While Wordpress is properly considered a blog authoring platform, the truth is that Wordpress has morphed far beyond blogs. The later versions of the platform (the latest release was 2.8.4) support myriad plug-ins and widgets, which allow you to integrate advanced features on your site – such as  flash slideshows, shopping carts, podcasts, mailing lists, links to social sites like Twitter and Facebook, SEO management capabilities, and much more – with the click of a button. Wordpress, in fact, is more like a content management system; the Wordpress software sets up your site and provides you with an easy way to upload information, whether text or images. You get a perfect looking blog/site, without having to poke around with the “guts” of html or css code running behind the scenes.

Wordpress is free (actually, as the site says, it is “both free and priceless at the same time”). You can download the software for installation on your favorite web host (a list of free hosts can be found at Click Here Free, but note that most of them either put ads on your site, or don’t let you use your own domain name). Actually you probably don’t even need to upload Wordpress to your site host, because it’s probably already included in the batch of software and services they provide (if the site where your web pages are hosted has you log in using Cpanel, Wordpress is already there). And, if all else fails, you can join the 223,954 other people with  blogs/sites at the free Wordpress hosting site, a free service provided by Wordpress. And, Wordpress is available in just about every language you can name, including Hebrew.

Everyone wants to be unique; nobody likes cookie cutter platforms, where the tools make your site end up looking similar to others who’ve used the platform. Uniqueness (along with advanced capabilities) is one reason professional web site builders are still in business, despite the plethora of free blog and site building platforms like Wordpress and Blog.com. But folks like us who want to save money are aiming a little lower. Luckily, though, with Wordpress, your aim can be almost as good as a pro’s!

When you first install Wordpress, the software sets you up with a default theme – one that will seem very familiar to you, because you will have seen it on dozens of blogs and sites on the internet, belonging to people who never bothered to change the default theme (called, oddly enough, Wordpress Default theme). But changing a theme is simple; all you have to do is find a theme you like, upload it to your host, and click on the “themes” button in your Wordpress site’s control panel to switch. Wordpress does all the heavy lifting, fitting your blog/site’s data into the new layout you’ve chosen.

So where do you find themes? That, I have found, is one of the biggest challenges in using Wordpress – not because they’re hard to find, but because there are so many! You can pay hundreds of dollars for Wordpress themes, but there are plenty of free ones to choose from as well, such as those listed here. The thing I look for when searching out a Wordpress theme (I recently converted all four of my sites to Wordpress) is support, flexibility/features (ie how much the site can be easily customized), and, of course, price (free!) Among the themes I’ve used are Mandigo, Atahualpa, Arthemia, Mimbo, and others – all with nice features and easy to access and understand support.

How long does it take to set up a Wordpress site? That depends on how much you tinker with the features, and how much configuring you want to do (Atahualpa, for example, has over 200 options you can tweak, until you get things “just right!”). Between the configuration options and the hundreds (thousands?) of plug-ins, you can easily and quickly (within a couple of days, even for newbies) build a blog/site you will be proud of posting on and promoting.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? To most of you, that is; you’ll note that I haven’t made any comparisons of Wordpress and other blogging/site building platforms. No doubt there is someone out there who is ready to pounce and e-mail me something like “why didn’t you mention that Blogger.com lets you do xyz that Wordpress can’t…”

Whew! I’m already afraid to open my e-mail! The truth is, there are many platforms out there that can be used to do what Wordpress does (not as easily or as successfully, though). The reason I wouldn’t consider Blogger is because I want to host my sites under my own domain names, something you can’t do at Blogger.com. And, then there’s the analysis of Wordpress (the platform) vs. Blogger.com. But there’s no need for a Blogger vs. Wordpress showdown; the blogosphere is big enough for the both of them.

Facebook and Youtube have been playing an important role in this too, with the former hosting longer manifestoes and idea exchanges, and the latter hosting grainy film of protests and police attacks  captured on cell phone cameras. But for “front line” news bulletins, Twitter has emerged as the preferred mode of clandestine communication. The “Twitter Revolution,” as some are calling it, is apparently giving the Iranian government conniptions, to the extent that the U.S. State Department supposedly asked the Twitter people to postpone scheduled maintenance that would have shut down the service during the elections – the better to enable Iranians to communicate news abroad.

As events have developed, many members of the “chattering classes” have commented on the emergence of social network applications as agents of social change etc., to the extent that the concept has turned into a media cliché almost overnight! Note that Twitter has played a role in several social upheavals already – it helped get a college kid out of jail in Egypt last year, and students in Moldova used it to organize anti-government protests earlier this year. The Twitter Revolution in Iran was the first one to be recognized in a big way, however – possibly because many mainstream journalists have started using Twitter themselves only recently!

On the other hand, Twitter can be used for “evil,” as well – to disseminate disinformation, for example, like a Twitterer called Bamos did, when he got conservatives up in arms about phony spending proposals in the U.S. Federal Budget. Bottom line – Twitter is a tool – like e-mail or the telephone. There are lots of ways to communicate, and Twitter is one more. What’s “revolutionary” about social media’s role in the Iranian uprising is that the authorities have been unable to shut it down completely, as they have other methods of communication; and that Iranians and Westerners have developed numerous methods to beat the internet suppression. But chances are that if the phones worked,  protesters would use that tool instead. I certainly would.

Never one to chatter, I won’t bore you with media cliches; you can see for yourself just how important  Twitter has been in Iran by surfing to the Twitter search site and typing in “Iran.” But there are a few other things I take away from the Twitter Revolution, specifically relevant to us here in Israel:

1) The internet doesn’t (always) hate us: Somehow, when there’s a problem anywhere in the Mideast, it’s at least partially the Jews’/Israel’s fault. Israel is to blame for Iraq, Lebanon, and other trouble spots, according to most of the region’s residents, the “voices of balance” in the blogosphere, and even the mainstream media. Indeed, as things heated up in Tehran last week, the government “discovered” an Election Day plot to bomb crowded sites in the city, organized by you-know-who. In fact, some in the anti-Israel blogging crowd (some of whom I wrote about recently) have blamed the whole Twitter Revolution thing on us as well; it’s an attempt on Israel’s part to destabilize Iran, and when things are destabilized enough, we will attack them. According to this theory, somehow three or four Israelis are disseminating all the Iran uprising tweets, thus causing gullible Iranians to resist Ahmenijadad. It’s very complicated!

Needless to say, ridiculous conspiracy theories like these are being totally ignored by Twitter users, and even by the blogosphere, for the most part. The fact that Iranians are able to tweet out what’s going on as it happens makes it clear that this is an organic uprising, and that Israel, while it may or may not be happy about what’s going on, has nothing to do with it. It’s a nice change of pace, not being “responsible” for a Middle East mess!

2) Israel isn’t all that bad, even for Palestinians: As I mentioned earlier, the reason Iranians are being forced to rely on Twitter and other social media to get the word out is because the “traditional” methods of communication – international phone service, worldwide media reporting – has been cut off by the authorities. Would Iranians choose to use these services if the traditional alternatives were available? There’s no way to know, of course, but Iranians – and the rest of us – are fortunate that we live in a time when alternatives are available.

However, note that the Palestinians, whose “struggle” has gotten far more publicity than the Iranians’, are not big social media users (until a month ago, the common wisdom said that Iranians were on board with the mullah system and were big Ahmenijadad fans; clearly this uprising didn’t come out of nowhere). There’s plenty of internet in Palestinian Authority controlled areas, and PA residents are just as big cellphone fanatics as Israelis. Yet Hamas and Fatah haven’t resorted to “underground” reports from the field in order to get the news out. That’s because they don’t have to! For a speck on the map, geographically and numerically – Israel – and the Palestinians – get far more media coverage than they should. Palestinians don’t use alternative communications tools to promote their “uprisings” – because the traditional methods work just fine, thanks to Israel’s liberal policies.

3) The Middle East “blog balance” has changed once again: One reason the anti-Israel internet crowd is trying to delegitimize the Iranian uprising is because of the impact it will have on U.S. policy in the Mideast. While President Obama hasn’t taken sides on the election yet, he has demanded that the Iranian government stop beating up its citizens (each subsequent statement that he has made has been stronger than the previous one). So it would appear that  U.S. will have no choice but to back away from the “dialogue” it had been planning with the Ahmenijadad regime, at least temporarily – and maybe permanently, if  Ahmenijadad loses his job.

You have to imagine that Obama is doing some thinking about his whole Middle East stance – and that maybe there is something to the idea that democracy does make a difference. Israel isn’t perfect, but it’s a whole lot more democratic than Iran, Egypt, Syria, and the other dictatorships, kingdoms, and sheikhdoms in the neighborhood. Obama was supposed to be different, the anti-Israel bloggers believed; he was finally, after all these years, going to “stick it” to Israel. But reality has apparently bitten, and now the rest of the world might take what Israel says about Iran – and maybe even other issues – a little more seriously. It’s a blow to the anti-Israel forces on the internet – and it’s all thanks to social media, and especially Twitter.

It’s tempting to think of the blatherings of web anti-Semites as just that. But somehow, those words are getting translated into action. Since the dawn of the “social web” – free-for-all blogging, Myspace/Facebook, and now Twitter, there has been a clear uptick in the number of people ready to go out to the town square and march against Israel. While it’s difficult to pinpoint specific causes and effects where you could quantify how more social web organizing resulted in larger protests, it’s clear that “they” are using social web tools – to good effect. Just ask Israeli tennis player Andy Ram, who in March was forced to play in a near empty arena in Malmo, Sweden. Seven thousand people staged a sometimes violent protest that led the authorities to ban nearly all spectators from the hall. That protest was heavily promoted on Swedish blogs, as well as in the media – and from the point of view of organizers, it was a smashing success.

Clearly there are plenty of dedicated anti-Israel bloggers out there who are using the social media to great effect. Some of them apparently spend whole days posting articles and links designed to incite their readers against Israel (and Jews, for that matter). Don’t these people have to work? Apparently not – but whether they’re independently wealthy or are getting paid by international “peace” organizations is academic; they’re getting the job done for their side, pushing people to show up at events that really matter, like the protest that resulted in Andy Ram’s shabby treatment.

And what about our side? We, too, have our bloggers and tweeters. Most of them comment on internet news, articles, and other blogs, and some – like the Jewish Internet Defense Force (http://tinyurl.com/d7n4ex) have even organized successful on-line protests at Facebook and other sites. In that situation, thousands of JIDF Twitter followers helped organize a campaign to get a notorious anti-Israel Facebook group removed from the site. That’s a good example of harnessing social media to accomplish something constructive – but unfortunately, there’s not enough of it going on.

More on-line protests are needed, and not just when a large anti-Israel group rears its ugly head; we should be targeting blogs, newspaper articles, etc. that spew out anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate and lies. And when I say “targeting” I mean just that – sending out “action alerts” to readers to get them to take action, beyond reading (and presumably agreeing) with the criticism our bloggers have posted on a specific instance of anti-Israel negativity.

The “other side” does plenty of this kind of targeting – their organizers aren’t afraid to tell them to go out and give their nasty opinions in online forums, etc. All you have to do is look at the talkback forums on Israeli news sites; you see the same people giving their “Israel is always wrong” opinion at every opportunity, no matter how farfetched. Clearly these people see doing this as their “job” – whether or not they’re getting paid for it. While an Israeli news site like Jpost or Haaretz is not going to stop posting news stories, even if dozens of people react with negative comments, it unquestionably puts publications on the defensive, as writers anticipate the wave of negativity they’re about to experience in the talkbacks.

Well, why should our side be the ones who have to deal with this “wall of hate?” How about returning the favor, by “targeting” the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sites with comments that show them up for who and what they are – posted not just by one or two stalwarts, but by hundreds, or even thousands of people? Let’s face it – when it comes to Israel and Jews, the internet “information stream” has been largely hijacked by a specific group that doesn’t operate by Robert’s Rules of Order, or respect freedom of thought. There’s just one point of view as far as they’re concerned – the one that says we’re wrong – and no logic in the world is going to change their minds. And while our natural tendency would be to keep the debate civil and respectful, it’s almost impossible to act with such chivalry today. By fighting fire with fire, we’d be restoring the balance – reopening the door to honest discussion, as serious people on both sides drop the rhetoric and engage in honest, spam-free discussion.

In order to accomplish something like this, you would need two elements – organizers and targets. Bloggers who have popular sites might be good candidates for such a job; a Facebook group would be just as effective. Then you would begin searching for posts to comment on. There are a number of search engines that will crawl through the blogosphere, looking for the term(s) you submit.

Google’s got one, of course (http://blogsearch.google.com/), with advanced search using the same operators as regular search (http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html). Technorati (http://technorati.com/) is popular as well. Also notable is Twingly (http://www.twingly.com/), a Swedish site that is hoping to develop “the world’s best spam-free blog search engine,” Blogpulse (http://www.blogpulse.com/) from Nielsen, the TV ratings people, Feedmill (http://www.feedmil.com/), “a ‘long tail’ feed search engine,” and BackType (http://www.backtype.com/), which “connects millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media.”

There are also several tools for searching Twitter (note that there seems to be much less political content in Twitter – most “tweeters” are interested in business and technology, it appears). Twitter itself has an advanced search tool (http://search.twitter.com/). This page (http://tinyurl.com/6xoll3) has some tips on advanced Twitter searching. A site called Twearch (http://tinyurl.com/dlygyv) will search Twitter, Wikipedia, and Digg, as well as Tweepz (http://tweepz.com/), a service that checks what tweeters are tweeting about at any given moment. And the tools at http://tweetprobe.tumblr.com/ and http://www.trendrr.com/ are worth checking out as well. With a little effort, all of us can get onto the front lines, defending Israel – where it counts.

There’s that word again – “network.” You could be the best, the greatest, the most accomplished at what you do – but unless you figure out a way to get the attention of the person who makes the hiring decisions, you just might lose out to a less qualified candidate. Why? Because that person knew how to get their name at the top of the hiring person’s list – while you relied on the “traditional” method of responding to a want ad and sending in your resume.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that that “traditional” system is broken – but face it: When you’ve sent out a couple of hundred resumes with nary a response, it’s time to take a good, hard look at the process. It certainly isn’t your fault that “they” changed the rules of the game in the middle; but now that they have, you’re going to have to learn some new tricks in order to get back in the thick of the game.

You probably know about the various on-line networking sites already, like LinkedIn, Ning, and FaceBook, also much-used by professionals these days). Networking works; I know several people who have had success in finding jobs using LinkedIn, for example, depending on how much work they put into it. It should be noted, however, that these people put a great deal of time and effort, fine-tuning their LinkedIn profiles, joined many groups, and built up a large bank of connections (500+). Building up such a large network could take awhile, though.

And while you should by all means nurture your LinkedIn presence, there’s a new kid in town you can use to get to the people who know where the jobs are: Twitter. Twitter, of course, is the Web-based SMS-type service where you can “tweet” (message) to all and sundry your latest adventures. That, at least, was how it started out, but Twitter has evolved – especially in the past couple of months, it seems, as people seek new avenues to beef up their business networks (check out http://www.tweetcruit.com/). And because of Twitter’s very casual and open format, you “meet” people online far more easily than with other services. It might take you a couple of months to build up a network of, say, 50 connections using LinkedIn – but you could get that many in an afternoon, using Twitter!

In Twitter, you don’t make “friends” – you follow people, with their updates streaming on your own Twitter home page. Often, these people will follow you, eagerly reading your updates as you post them (according to Twitter theory, the more people you follow, the more likely you are to get followers). All “tweets” are limited to 140 characters, and you see the whole stream of consciousness emanating from your network on your Twitter home page (mine’s http://www.twitter.com/newzgeek, if you care to check it out). Posts range from what the writer is actually doing right now (“Just got out of the meeting”) to links to interesting news or blog posts, to questions and answers or requests for assistance. Unlike on LinkedIn or FaceBook, which give you time to digest what’s going on, Twitter is very “of the moment,” and you can spend a lot of time watching the posts go by. It’s lots of fun!

But before fun, work. You’re here for a very specific reason – to build up a network that can help you find job opportunities, and the people behind them. It stands to reason that the more people you “know” – the bigger your network – the better. And more than any other social networking system, Twitter is the place to go for big network numbers. In the Twitter world, there’s only one standard whereby success is measured – the number of followers in your network. And when you follow, others follow you. It’s like being at a party – everyone wants to be the center of attention, but those potential attention-centers need you to pay attention to them. The more people you “know,” the more tweets you will be privy to, and the more connections you will make that can lead to “success,” however you define that.

That’s the theory, and there are hundreds of sites that will give you ideas on how to leverage Twitter in this way to get more clicks on your blog, sell more products on-line, or just enhance your reputation in an on-line community (hi-tech, of course, but there are many other industries where on-line buzz helps, like restaurants and hotels). If your goal is to enhance your reputation – your “brand” – for online success, you can just follow straight Twitter networking procedures and gather your followers.
Job-seekers, especially in a place like Israel, have to work a little harder, nurturing a network of locals, who of course will know better where the local jobs are. First, when you set up your Twitter account, put your “elevator pitch” in your Twitter bio (160 characters), so potential followers know who you are and what you can do. If that’s not enough room, integrate more info about yourself in your Twitter background, using http://www.freetwitterdesigner.com/. Also include a link to an online CV (the ones at http://www.visualcv.com are especially suited for something like Twitter).

Once you set up your Twitter account, it’s time to seek out Twitter users located in Israel and start following them, thus building up your network. Fortunately, there are a number of services that let you search for Twitterers in your area, in real time, such as http://www.twitterlocal.net/ (requires Adobe Air), http://twitsnear.me/, and http://www.tweetscan.com/. The latter can be used to search by location and keyword, as can http://monitter.com/, so you could try a search like “Tel Aviv Accounting” if you were looking for an accounting job, for example. But it probably won’t be that easy. You can also join directories of Twitter users, such as http://justtweetit.com/ and http://wefollow.com/tag/israel/ . And others (Google “Twitter directories). And don’t forget the plumbers – they’ve got a page at http://bit.ly/oDVJw (people in other professions may have more luck at http://twitter.com/jobangels and http://twitter.com/jobshouts).

Now that you’re connected, start tweeting – about yourself, your work, your skills, etc. If the usual tweet is a form of “microblogging,” as it’s been called, think of the messages you send out as “micro-resume-ing.” Send out interesting links about your industry, links to blog posts (you really ought to have one, too, but that’s another article), and the occasional “if anyone hears about openings in ___, please let me know!” The more people hear about you, the more they’ll realize what you’re capable of – and the more likely you are to hear about the jobs you’re after. With Twitter, “what you know” gets communicated directly to “who you know!”

I couldn’t find any hard statistics on how many people have been able to find jobs using Twitter, but there are plenty of stories online. And it makes sense that you have a better chance of finding something, depending on how well known you are in the community. At least for now, Twitter is “the place to be” on-line, and users actually read the communications the people in their network send out (they’re only 140 characters, after all) – as opposed to not reading the resumes piling up in their e-boxes. Finally, a case where the short attention spans most of us have actually work to your benefit!