Blogging

My Year of Blogging

by

Haim Watzman

It’s exactly a year since we launched the South Jerusalem blog. And it’s been a great year-one in which we’ve gained hundreds of readers, some of whom think we’re left-wing fanatics, some who think we’re hopeless jingoists, and at least one who thinks we should relocate to Las Vegas.

I started blogging about four years after I was first told “You should start a blog.” I didn’t want to start one for a number of very good reasons, all of which this last year’s experience have proven well-founded. A friend of mine told me about her WordPress account after I asked what is wordpress? When I started, I had very little clue about cpanel hosting and all of the other things it takes to start a blog. I thought that I would be spending a lot of money creating my blog, but it was just getting a domain and finding a web hosting service to get the blog to go live. Plus knowing that you can use something similar to these working HostGator India Coupons to help save you some money and that’s one less aspect to think about when it comes to blogging.

As I feared, I have spent far more time than I can afford writing blog posts for which I get paid nothing, and because I’m not getting paid I can’t take the time to do the research and legwork that would be necessary to make the blog a really valuable source of news and analysis. Maybe I should consider using hostiserver.com so I have more time to write, not fiddling with the tech side of things. But with newspapers hitting the boards right and left, and with the surviving ones slashing their budgets for freelance stories, it’s hard to get paid enough to do serious reporting in the traditional media anyway.

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A Note to Our Readers

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We do our best to post high-quality material, and we’re grateful to our readers for the generally high level of discussion that takes place in the comments to our posts. If we don’t always respond ourselves, it’s because we’re busy working on the next post. Recently, however, we’ve had several cases in which readers have … Read more

Blogging Ethics and Nefesh B’Nefesh–Does Business Class Corrupt?

by

Haim Watzman

Shouldn’t journalistic ethics apply to bloggers? Specifically, shouldn’t bloggers refuse to accept perks from companies, organizations, and power brokers they write about? This could apply to all social media influencers too. Some people believe that if an influencer or blogger has put all the work in to grow their following, they should be able to receive some sort of repayment. Whilst that’s true, TikTok influencers can use services to help them grow their following. One such service is the TikTok view increasing service by Virall, which claims to get real peoples eyes on your video by running Google Ads to it. These PPC ads will then help you get more TikTok views, says the website. Once they have a big following, they can then receive some brand deals. I’m a newbie in the blogging world so I don’t really know enough yet, but I believe that any blogger or influencer who seeks credibility and independence must accept this standard, even if you were to start a blog on WordPress and believe yourself to not rack up much traffic in the foreseeable future.

I know I said I’m a newbie, but isn’t the whole point of starting a blog in the first place to have traffic driven towards it? Surely you want it to reach as many people as possible? I’ve heard from many people who have recently started their own blogs that researching something similar to web hosting canada should be one of the very first things that you should do before uploading your first post. They’ve told me that it is meant to help with your page load time, if it’s quick then you have an increased chance of having more traffic. Which should help your blog and its success in the long run. But this might not always be the case.

The issue came up specifically when I attended the First International Jewish Bloggers Convention last Wednesday here in Jerusalem. The convention was organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, which promotes aliya from Western countries. I’m all in favor of aliya, and Nefesh B’Nefesh does fine work, even if its close association with Binyamin Netanyahu-the convention’s keynote speaker-and other figures on the Israeli right is not to my taste.

To kick off the convention, Nefesh B’Nefesh flew a number of Israel-based Jewish bloggers to the U.S. so that they could accompany a planeload of new immigrants on their move to their new country. At least some of the bloggers were given business class seats. They were also given complete freedom to write whatever they wished about what they saw and heard-it could hardly have been otherwise given the nature of the blog medium.

So what’s the problem? If Nefesh B’Nefesh is a laudable outfit, and if it gave the beneficiaries of its largesse complete freedom, what could be wrong?

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