Ariga: Detailed information On Middle East Issues
www.ariga.com

About Ariga www.ariga.com
Ariga sounds Italian. It's not. Nor is it Greek, Phoenician or Turkish. It is a Hebrew word meaning weave, in other words, what we all try to do on the web.

Ariga is owned and operated by Robert Rosenberg, a veteran journalist and writer based in Israel. He owns and operates it on his own. As of June 1 2001, Ariga had more than 2,000,000 visitors since Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in November 1995. As ofJune 1, 2001, Ariga averaged 2,500 unique visitors daily.

The site was opened to the public in mid 1995 as an experimental web-publishing platform, the first web-based source of news from Israel, emphasizing the peace process, but including poetry, painting and other subjects of interest to the owner.

Ariga now mainly carries information from pro-peace and human rights groups in Israel and Palestine. It is an open platform, unaffiliated with any specific group, solely edited by Robert Rosenberg.

At various times Ariga has been an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly and quarterly, depending on how much time I have to deal with it. The archives can be found here

This site is organized into three main sections -- Business, which as of January 1 leads to Koldoon.com, the world's fastest growing database of startup technology companies and their investors; Peace, both on-site and off-site links to information resources about peace efforts for the Middle East; and Pleasure, arts, letters and entertainment.

Among the most popular sections in Ariga are:

The Interactive Pop Chart. It opened with some Beatles & Rolling Stones, and both Elvis's -- Presley and Costello. Thousands have voted, nominated songs, and since you can't vote more than once every 24 hours, sent their friends to back a song.

The Yiddish page is a huge glossary of Yiddish phrases transliterated into English -- with translations. The Writers Guild of America chose it as the site they recommend to American writers who need a Yiddish phrase. You can scroll the full list or use the search form for a specific term or word.

Ariga also includes

Robert Rosenberg's Avram Cohen Mystery Quartet. One of the world's first e-books (online since 1995), is The Cutting Room, unfortunately now out of print, is available to Ariga visitors as a zipped file. Unzip it into a subdirectory on your hard disk and go into it using your browser, opening the index.htm file first. First chapters of Crimes of the City, House of Guilt and An Accidental Murder are all available online, with links to purchasing the books at Amazon, as well. If you want to help Ariga's peace efforts, why not buy one of Robert Rosenberg's Mysteries at Amazon critically acclaimed, insightful novels about Israel at the end of the 20th century.

In March 1998, Ariga merged with Vladimir Aleynikov's VCom Software R&D forming DataSphere, which was subsequently joined by Michael Eilan and Tamara Genosar, who, from 1991-1997, ran Israel's leading English-language monthly business magazine, Ariga carries the original LINK Magazine online as an archive for historical purposes. DataSphere Ltd. is a Tel Aviv-based startup, which produces Koldoon -- the online technology investment wizard, growing 18 hours a day as the world's largest database of startup companies and their investors.