Israel’s blog scene is heating up. Windows Live Spaces (formerly MSN Spaces), Microsoft’s blog site, will be translated to Hebrew in the coming year.
The service, which enables every surfer to develop and design a Web log in a few simple steps, is already available to Israeli surfers, but has not been adapted to the Hebrew language. The interface is provided in more than a dozen other languages.
Windows Live Spaces is the world’s leading blog site with more than 100 million unique users per month, according to data provided by comScore. The service is also expected to be upgraded and join Microsoft’s Live series later in the year.
Upon Google’s introduction to the Israeli audience, the company stated at the beginning of the year that it plans to translate as many services as possible into Hebrew within 18 months.
Google’s blog service, Blogger, is now translated into 10 languages. There is speculation that Blogger and the Adsense content-targeted advertising program will also be translated into Hebrew in the coming months.
At the moment, a Hebrew blog can be started on the Blogger service, but the users only receive an English interface and have to adapt the design patterns into Hebrew themselves. In addition, the advertising service has yet to offer official support for the Hebrew content.
The introduction of two global giants like Microsoft and Google into the Israeli blog domain is expected to pose a serious competition to Israel’s leading blog sites Israblog and Tapuz. Each of these Web sites has tens of thousands of active registered blogs.
Israblog provides a large variety of options for bloggers, but most of the particularly convenient options are still offered for $25 a year. Tapuz offers the advanced options to everyone for free, in return for placing banners, and soon textual ads, in the blogs.
Tapuz announced recently that it would hand out its profits from the advertisements to the surfers. The move was aimed at drawing new bloggers and keeping the existing ones, although the company denies any connection between the move and the introduction of new elements into the blog domain.
The increasing competition may also harm smaller blog sites based on independent systems, such as Corky.Net, Blogim and Bit.