ITGumbo: spicing IT up

After months of talk and planning in the blogosphere, the WordPress Israel website has announced that next month there will be the first annual WordCamp Israel conference featuring popular WordPress blogger, Lorelle Van Fossen.

The conference is free and open to anyone , but only the first 250 people who sign up for it will be able to attend it. In the first few hours of the conference announcement, over 100 people already signed up. While the conference will focus on WordPress, it will also highlight important functions about blogging. As several attendees on the list use other blog platforms, it seems that this conference doesn't represent just a WordPress obsession, but a general blogging obsession in Israel.

Considering Israel's high-tech industry's inclinations, it isn't surprising that Israelis have become obsessed with blogging and different platforms that let them do so. To get a grasp of how popular it is in Israel, Israel's largest blog network, Israblog, has more than tripled from about 100,000 in 2005 to over 370,000 today. That's 5% of Israel's population on one network and that's not the only Israeli blog network. It also doesn't include Israelis who use other non-Israeli blog networks, which is probably the majority of immigrants to Israeli.

Take my two roommates and myself, for example. We are all new immigrants to Israel and all maintain blogs on blog platforms that we found out about in America. Considering these factors, Israel's percentage of bloggers must be significantly higher than 5% and more conferences similar to WordCamp are likely being planned to meet and tap into this growing trend.