Joel Leyden - Internet Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 Social Media Pioneer

Mourning By Modem For Rabin [FINAL Edition] The Washington Post  - Washington, D.C. Date: Nov 9, 1995 Start Page: D.07 Section: STYLE Text Word Count: 758 Perturbations, pleasures, and predicaments on the information superhighway: Arnon Katz, 28-year-old Israeli computer specialist, lay awake the night Yitzhak Rabin was slain. He was, he said, consumed with the need to do something. So by 2 a.m. he and a colleague had a condolence page up and running on the World Wide Web. By the next day it already had thousands of "visits" from all over the world. And by the day after that it was also polished graphically, with a photograph and short biography of Rabin, a place for signatures and messages, and a final touch, an invitation to each visitor to light a virtual candle. Flickering candles now march down the page until a count on the final page is reached. (As of 2 p.m. Wednesday EST, there were over 15,000.) Katz and Joel Leyden, a New York transplant to Tel Aviv, are in the process of opening Netking, an on-line service in Israel akin to Prodigy and America Online. "We had the staff and the tools all in place," Leyden said, "so we could put the page up onto the Internet very quickly." It has only been four months, Katz said in a phone conversation this week from Tel Aviv, that the group has been working toward a Netking launch. Katz himself, although a marketing and communications specialist, has been involved with the Internet for only about a year "after my father-in-law gave me a modem." But he quickly found himself spending much of his time "playing," as his friends and family put it, with bulletin boards in Israel. "I decided it better be my job," he said. "It's too bad that our launch comes in such a sad way," he said, "but this gives people a way to express how they feel in a personal and easy way." The pair expect to keep the page up for an indefinite period and eventually will make a book for the Rabin family and the Israeli government. The messages include quotations and poetry along with expressions of condolence in many languages and alphabets, from countries as distant as Afghanistan and Uganda, Portugal and Australia, Romania and Norway, Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand and, of course, Israel, the United States and Canada.  "There are messages from Jews, Christians, Muslims and many others," Katz said. -- Sandy Rovner RoVVy@aol.com GETTING THERE: Use your net browser and the address http://wwwnetking. com. PHOTO CAPTION: Condolence Page and Biography of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, 1922-1995.