Too small for web20

A few years back after being slim all my life, I gained weight rapidly, and in the space of a year went from being average to outsize. Buying clothes became torture, In fact after trying on outfit after outfit I generally went home with the first thing I tried on in my bag, or worse still, hot, flustered and depressed, without making a purchase at all.

While I love the possibilities opened up by Web20, I feel like that outsize me on one of those doomed to fail shopping trips.

There are so many innovative and exciting tools on the web20 shelves but when I try them out for size most of them just don't fit. Yes, size is still a problem, only this time I'm undersize, I live and teach in Israel (last population count, just over 7 million)

By way of demonstration, look for Israel on Google Maps, see how many times you need to magnify the display before the word "Israel" appears on the world map, I defy you to find evidence of even one Israeli city there! (not shouting prejudice here, the same is true for many small countries particularly in the Middle East).

So, I teach in Israel, although my elementary students do learn English they are certainly not at a point where they can understand instructions, user guides and UIs in English, come to think of it neither can some of their teachers.

However that's a part of the problem which I can solve, I can create screencasts etc with instructions in Hebrew, if an app is fairly intuitive the students, will sometimes even manage on their own.

The real problem is the inability to write in Hebrew in many of the web20 tools. Sometimes Hebrew cannot be input at all, other times it can be input but will display as "gobbldeygook", and other times Hebrew can be input and displayed but the right alignment is problematic. The only company who seems to have addressed this seriously so far (putting the map issue aside)is Google, many(not all) of their tools allow for inputting Hebrew characters, correct right alignment and provide a Hebrew interface.

After spending about a year on a nightly browsing "spree", opening user accounts, trying out demos, offering to translate UIs and with lists of bookmarks,user names, identities and passwords that I am ashamed to admit, I am getting to that point where I guess I'll have to leave the really "cool" outfits and interesting accessories on the shelf and go home with the first thing I saw.