Israeli bloggers like to joke that wars and terrorist attacks are good for business.

When katyusha rockets rained on Israeli cities in the North this summer, English-language bloggers say the number of visitors to their online Web logs reached all-time highs. "If things ever got peaceful here, the interest in our blogs would definitely drop," admits Brian Blum, the former Californian who says traffic on his blog, This Normal Life, doubled during the tense summer weeks in July and August.

Indeed, Anglo bloggers, as well as those who study them, say that the Lebanon war has increased the visibility and readership of English-language blogs here. Though numbers have petered out since the summer highs, bloggers insist that their growing readerships have given them a greater platform for sharing their perspective with people around the world.

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"There was a huge wave of discovery during the war," explains Lisa Goldman, the blogger behind On the Face, who says the number of hits on her site grew from 1,000 to 100,000 unique visitors a day during the war. "The numbers went down again after the war, but some of that momentum was sustained. I gained a much more cosmopolitan audience." Goldman, a Canadian-born journalist, was blogging furiously throughout the war and her postings, together with those of Lebanese bloggers, were featured on a number of major news outlets, including the Washington Post, Le Monde and the Guardian. Her high-profile blog, together with others across the country, gave readers around the world a sense of what ordinary Israelis were going through, she says.

"It gave outsiders a more nuanced view of what people are thinking," says Goldman. "There was definitely a huge shift to the blogs for alternative sources of information."

According to Yael Kaynan, a lecturer in the communications department at Ben-Gurion University and a member of the university's Burda Center for Innovative Communications, interest in English-language blogs spiked during the war. "The interest in Anglo blogs is absolutely greater now than before the war," she says. "The war prompted people to look at Anglo blogs within Israel and find out what is going on here."

Kaynan, who runs her own blog, Oleh Girl, says that readers from around the world reached English-language Israeli sites, including hers, as a result of the war, with many of them coming back even after the war. "We all had a huge amount of traffic during the war and have become more popular now than prior to the summer," she says. "I got a lot of new readers who didn't know about me before the war."

Indeed, Israeli Anglo bloggers say that news consumers are increasingly looking to blogs for alternative sources of information to mainstream news outlets. "When something happens, people rush to the blogs to see what's going on," Blum says. "Blogs offer personal insight into how people are coping with what's going on. The personal experience of people like you or me or anyone is very compelling."

Bloggers say there is no way of determining the exact number of Israeli blogs written in English, but those familiar with the community agree that the number, which is "in the hundreds," continues to grow rapidly.

"Blogging everywhere, including here, has really taken off," says Alex Stein, a recent British transplant who writes the False Dichotomies blog. "I'm always discovering new interesting Anglo blogs. People like to get their voice out, even if no one listens."

To be sure, what used to be a small community of a few dozen bloggers who knew each other on and offline has ballooned, bloggers say.

"The community has changed simply because it's gotten so much bigger," Kaynan explains. "I used to be able to do a scan of all blogs in a day at the beginning, but that is certainly impossible now. It also used to be a much more tight-knit community, and now a number of smaller communities have formed: religious bloggers, secular bloggers, left-wing bloggers, right-wing bloggers."

Because they write in English, Anglo bloggers naturally have a much wider audience than their Hebrew-language counterparts. Some native Israelis have even begun blogging in English - the "lingua franca" of the blogosphere.

As a result, English-language bloggers here say they have become a natural resource for people around the world looking to learn more about the Israeli experience in its various forms.

Some bloggers report readers in places like Lebanon and Iran, while others say they have strong readership among the right-wing American evangelical community.

"People who write Israeli blogs in English are very aware that they are writing for people abroad," says Hanan Cohen, the creator of Webster, a site that aggregates English-language Israeli blog feeds. "Israeli blogospheres in Hebrew and English are totally different worlds. The blogs in English are mostly old and new immigrants who are writing from a perspective of hasbara [pro-Israel public relations], whereas Hebrew blogs are written for people locally. Many bloggers in English focus on explaining their political perspective to the people they left behind."

Indeed, a number of Anglo bloggers interviewed say they started blogging as a way to explain themselves to the outside world.

"I wanted people to realize that we are normal," says former New Yorker Rachel Ben David, who lives in the settlement of Peduel and blogs by the name West Bank Mama. "There is demonization of settlers in the mainstream media. People who live in Judea and Samaria are very idealistic, but they're not necessarily crazy."

"Most of us are trying to influence the public debate," says Aussie Dave, the blogger behind Israellycool who asked that his last name be withheld. "It's more than just talking about what we had for breakfast that day. It's a loftier goal. Here, there's more of a sense of purpose and urgency to blogging."