Cross-posted to the Jewish Techs blog at The Jewish Week The more I blog, the thicker my skin gets. Overtime, I’ve learned to prepare myself before reading the comment section at the bottom of my posts. With great inventions, we have to take the bad with the good. It’s been wonderful that newspapers and magazines…
Here’s my latest post on the Jewish Techs blog (The Jewish Week): Chabad Lubavitch has always been out in front when it comes to using the Internet for publicity. Back in the 90’s, Chabad took full advantage of the virtual communities on America Online (AOL) and then launched some of the most impressive websites once…
Here is my most recent post on the Jewish Techs blog (The NY Jewish Week) Jews aren’t sarcastic at all! Okay, that was me being sarcastic, but the problem with the Jewish tradition of sarcasm is that it doesn’t translate well in Cyberspace where tone of speech doesn’t come through in text. That’s why it…
Here’s my latest post for the Community Next blog “Rabbi J in the D”: We all know that Jews can rock. After all, you only need to listen to Bob Dylan or Gene Simmons of Kiss to know that. But there are also some Jewish singers who are rocking Jewish music… and I don’t mean…
Cross-posted to the Jewish Techs blog (The New York Jewish Week) Quite often I get asked to consult synagogues on their Web presence. The first thing I do is take a look at their current Web site and try to determine in which year it was created. I can usually tell its production date within…
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) likes to think of itself as the Jewish AP. The JTA is a non-profit news service that disseminates the happenings in the Jewish world as soon as they happen. Ideally, they try to scoop all the other news agencies and print media. The long-time publisher of the JTA, Mark Joffe, stepped…
Cross-posted at Jewish Techs Every synagogue minyan (daily prayer group) has the one person who always seems to be there. In some congregations, this might be the gabbai (a ritual director of sorts). In other shuls it might be the rabbi. And in others it might be a lay person who is very dedicated and wants to ensure…
The first time I heard about a “virtual simcha” was in the late 1990s. Detroit was hit with a massive snowstorm and the 8-day old baby boy’s aunt who was to play the role of rabbi was stuck at the airport in New York. The rabbi improvised and she officiated at her nephew’s bris via…
Cross-posted at Jewish Techs Email is like a cat. I don’t know if it has nine lives, but people still use this form of communication even though it’s been pronounced dead many times in recent years. The general consensus among experts in online communication is that social media is killing the medium of email. Just as companies…
Cross-posted at Jewish Techs What do Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, blogger Emily Gould, and the 10th-11th century scholar Rabbeinu Gershom have in common? They all articulated their views about privacy. Zuckerberg was criticized last month for Facebook’s new privacy settings. Over 500 million worldwide users of Facebook had more of their information made public because…