IASPS

Quarterly Report
Winter 2000

Keeping Tabs on Israel's Internet

Comments of the President

The Director's Column

CNET Report Relies on IASPS

Koret Fellowship Program Brings Results

The Institute and the Internet

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The Institute and the Internet

"Our website represents the new face of the Institute," remarked Professor Robert J. Loewenberg, president of IASPS, in a recent e-mail directive to IASPS staff and Fellows instructing them to keep the pace up. As reported in the previous Quarterly, Fall 1999, the Institute has embarked on a major overhaul of its website, which entails a revamping of almost every aspect of its operations. 

"The information age allows the Institute not simply to distribute its `bread and butter' research and policy papers to a much broader audience at a fraction of the cost," explained Loewenberg, "it also provides us the opportunity if not the responsibility to comment on a whole host of policy matters on a daily basis and to measure and gauge how effectively we are getting our message across." 

Beginning in the waning months of the last millennium, the Institute took the decisive step to launch its new website and several new features that would provide Internet "surfers" the opportunity to read about economic and strategic issues on a daily basis through the critical lens of Israel's leading think tank. The results, as evidenced by the website statistical analysis provided by IASPS's new U.S.-based ISP (Internet Service Provider), have been rewarding. 

"We are witnessing a real phenomenon," explained Professor Alvin Rabushka, director of the Institute's Economics Division, and the driving force behind the move into the "Internet Space." 

"While we have had a website for several years now, the problem was that the Institute, like many other organizations, was waiting for that defining moment when the Internet would become more than a novelty. With the free-market commercial development that has exploded in the last year or two, we recognized immediately what this could mean for the policy business," Rabushka added. 

In fact, the Institute is now well ahead of the curve. Adding an almost daily commentary through the "News Behind the News" feature, a regularly updated op-ed column on the "Decline of a nation-state," and a searching analysis of geopolitical issues relative to oil and the Caspian region entitled "The Caspian Project," the Institute has become the source for a critical policy analysis for thousands of readers every month. 

Yuval Levin, the Institute's web master, provided the following analysis: "Over just the last several months, we have experienced an explosion among our reader base. What used to amount to a few hundred surfers a month, has now become many thousands of readers per month who spend an amazing amount of time reading a variety of information, each one `hitting' our site an average of 15 times per visit. That is a phenomenal `stickiness' quotient, as it is known in the Internet industry." 

Levin explains that this is all without a word of advertising. But even that has changed. "As of mid-February we began running banner ads in the Jerusalem Post Internet edition," he revealed. "Once we have had sufficient time to review and analyze the data on this banner, we will look to other resources like The New York Times."

"What makes the web so exciting is that we now have access to a grass roots exposure that will increase our effectiveness in so many areas," commented Zev Golan, the Institute's Associate Director in Jerusalem. "Government officials know now that thousands of policy professionals, politicians, and voters, both here and in the U.S., are reading our work on the website. They know, if not by experience at least instinctively, what this will mean for destructive government policies that in the past have not been subject to national or international scrutiny." 

The Institute's new face is one undergoing cosmetic surgery every day. Levin believes that the Internet does not lend itself to stagnation. "A website must be dynamic and keep offering new material, new features and new insights. We here at IASPS are striving to make this site the leading source of reliable information on policy issues relative to the Middle East." 

The Institute's webmaster Levin was born in Haifa and raised in Israel until the late 1980s, when he and his family moved to the States due in large part to Israel's repressive tax and regulatory environment. Having received his B.A. in political science and graduating summa cum laude from American University in Washington, D.C., Levin is now pursuing his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago.