About iKibbitz

I made an introductory post to my new website. It pretty much says what the site is all about. Here it is:

This is the very first post on iKibbitz. You may very well be our first reader. So what are we, and who is behind all of this? To help explain the purpose of this website I’ll tell you about kibbitz.

Kibbitz - In Yiddish, it’s spelled kibets, and it’s related to the Hebrew “kibbutz” or “collective.” But it can also mean verbal joking, which after all is a collective activity. It didn’t originally mean giving unwanted advice about someone else’s game - that’s an American innovation.

So how does that translate into a website? Well, this is what bloggers do. They give “unwanted” advice, or rather, commentary on anything. Except we are going to do it collectively! No, we aren’t trying to spread socialism into the blogosphere. We are trying to use the power of the collective to make the bloggers more successful, i.e. get more readers. Contributing bloggers can keep their own websites, but we want their content to be shown on our website as well.

Let me make this clear, we aren’t here to replace the newspapers. We wouldn’t be here with out the hard work of journalists. How else would we get the news? We are here to share our commentary on our favorite commentators and news stories. We are also going to talk about our own experiences, what ever our contributors want to talk about. Well, maybe not everything. No wack-a-doodles (Antisemites etc.) and crazy college stories.

So who is going to contribute? At first it is going to be just Comrade Tovya and I, Monsieur Ginger. Soon we are going to ask our favorite bloggers to join our enterprise. We don’t know every blogger so if you are interested in joining us, contact us.

As you may have noticed, kibbitz is a Jewish word, so the iKibbitz community will tend to be Jewish. But we don’t want to be limited by it. At first, we want to focus on what Jews like to talk about - politics, culture, Israel, Middle East, etc. But eventually we are hoping to get non-Jewish contributors as well. We welcome all. We don’t know where this enterprise will take us. Tovya and I are here to set the foundations, and the community will push us forward. We’ll be strong when the iKibbitz community is strong. Enough with the slogans.

Like good Jews, Tovya and I disagree on many things, and we respect that. We encourage criticism from our readers and fellow contributors. We are here to engage. We just want everybody to be honest about themselves and their opinions. We expect everybody in the community to be respectful of each other. If you aren’t respectful in this home, we reserve the right to use what ever power is given to us as website administrators.

People blog for many reasons. They blog because of the freedom that comes with it. They blog because it is an opprotunity to share their opinions. What ever your reason for blogging is, we are here to facilitate that. We are not a Left-wing website nor a Right-wing website. We are a community website. So we expect the community to respect that and you to respect the community.

We are still working on the kinks and knots so bear with us. I hope this will be the beginning of a beautiful kibbitz.

I'll add the site to my blog roll here so you find it easily.