Editor: Myself

Internet in Danger in Iran

Q. Why the Weblog Festival in Iran is important?

A. Because it has a big government organization backing it which spends a big amount of money on these kind of events.

There are workshops, roundtables, and exhibitions planed for it and on their website they have interviewed the IT Minister and some other officials. I'm sure it attracts a lot of people and attention.

But the thing is that while the judiciary has started a wide-spread crack-down on many medium or small sized ISPs, and given their religious and political concerns, I guess the whole IT industry in Iran is in real danger in short-term. (I really don't know why the recent crack-down has been ignored by the western media)

The hardliners are very sensative to radical anti-religious and anti-government websites. Also the student protest anniversary is to come in July 9th and like every year, they are going to fully control or close every possible channel of incoming information to Iran again, say Satellite TVs, Internet access, VoIP phones, etc. They usually become paranoid at this time of the year.

So the blogging festival is important in that it helps correct the bad image that the computer-illiterate judiciary officials and other religious groups have about the Internet. (Internet in their eyes is nothing but sex + radical anti-religious activism + espionage)

Many, among IT professionals and journalists, are seriously worried about the fate of the Internet in Iran, especially since the hardliners are coming to power.

Weblog Festival in Iran

Blogging Festival in Iran: "Attempting to form a society of the web Persian content providers, this festival tries to improve the quality of the published information by the means of discussing sessions, roundtables and the exhibition. This festival, backed by the PersianBlog team, as the greatest Farsi weblog provider, and the National Youth Organization of Iran, is the first practical attempt for sponsoring the bloggers and internet magazines."

Meanwhile, the dispute about the closed ISPs hasn't resolved yet and most of them remain closed yet.

New York Times' Gaffe

I'm really surprised to see that translated subtitles of people's short interview clips used in Nicholas Kristof's Multimedia report from Iran, Six Questions For Iran do not match what they really say.

For instance, the young farmer in the second part of the first question, talks about someone who has been thrown out of the parliament because of his or her constant criticism, but the English subtitles are about the chance of Shah's son to return and how things were better in Shah's time, which is also mentioned by Mr. Kristof himself.

I'm not trying to say that what Kristof or the subtitles say are not truth and the young man has never said these. But I guess the Iranian editor or assistant who has selected the clips hasn't been accurate enough.

Unfortunately the young farmer's clip is not the only example of such problem.

Chalabi's Stunt

Yesterday's raid on Chalabi's home looks to me as a clever stunt to make him an anti-American figure in the eyes of average Iraqis so it could improve his extremely low popularity in Iraq. (Based on a recent poll, Chalabi is the least trusted leader in Iraq, even less than Saddam.)

We've seen a lot of these sort of things in Iran and nobody believes these stunts there anymore.

I really doubt that Bush Administration can afford loosing Chalabi simply like this.

Crack down on ISPs

A dozen of small and medium-sized Iranian ISPs have been shut down over the last couple of weeks for various reasons: providing VoIP, failing to filter blacklisted websites, etc.

In a recent meeting, top judiciary officials have told the ISP association representative that that they've been studying for six months to catch those ISPs who do not filter as intense as they should. Even Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran unpopular prosecutor, has particularly said that he "won't let the Imam Hossein's dearests to be insulted" by some Iranian websites.

Apparently, in the recent crack down, both IT Ministry and Judiciary have been involved. The former to stop the VoIP that has terribly reduced their revenue, and the latter to prevent people access the radical anti-religious and anti-regime websites.

I haven't seen any report about it anywhere, by the way.

Blogrolling's big security issue

UPDATE:

- Blogrolling has announced that the issue is resolved.

- I had informed the Blogrolling.com support system about the issue at 5/12/2004 5:11 AM. So please do not accuse me of being unethical. By the way, I'm sure hadn't the issue gone public, they'd never taken it seriousely. This is exactly why media are cricial and powerful. But I do admit that I could be a little less specefic about what exactly the problem is.

------

God, what a mess.

Just log on to your BlogRolling account, then find someone elses Blogroll id by looking at their page source, and then use that id with the edit_roll.phtml script on blogrolling.com, and there you go. You can edit, delete, add or anything you want to that poor blogroll. And look who is vulnarable (only some of them).

Do the guys at Tucows know this stupid security hole?

Thanks to an Iranian blogger for the tip and for being a nice person by not deleteing my links.

If you don't believe me, logon to your Blogrolling account and click here. You can do whataever you want to Blogs for Bush. (Let's add John Kerry's blog to it.)

I also recommend you to take a backup from all your blogrolls right now until they fix this.

Iranische weblogs in Der Spiegel

Wilkommen to all visitors who have found this website through Spiegel's story on Iranian blogs, written by Fiete Stegers. (Here is the automatically translated English version by Google)

If you are looking for my posts during Sina Motallebi's arrest, you can find them here or through archives on the right side of this page. Other The archives may help you access all my posts about Iran, weblog, the world, etc.

vagrantly is my photoblog

Finally I launched my photoblog, titled vagrantly. (What the hell does it mean?)

In addition to new photos that I take, I'll try to post some of my old photos from Iran when I had a Nikon Coolpix 990. (Now I have a Canon G2 which I bought almost 3 years ago.)

I've also decided to put Google ads on it, if you don't mind; since it consumes a lot of bandwidth and space. So you can easily support me through them.

Comments would be off for now unless I see I can manage them--God, comments are good but take an awful lot of time to manage.

HM's SpamAssasin is failing

What has happened to Hosting Matters' SpamAssassin? Spam mail has been flooded to all my mailboxes since last week. Does anyone else has the same problem?

Toronto's best brunch - 2004

Just an irrelavant note:

• Mitzi's (Sorauren)
• Easy (Queen W and Roncesvalles)
• Saving Grace (Bellwoods/Dundas)
• Bonjour Brioche (Queen E. and Degrassi)
• Hello Toast (a little further east of Bonjour Brioche)
• Xacutti (College west of bathurst a little more expense but delicious)

From: Reviews by Mark, Aaron, and Wendy

Audience choices:

1. Irish Embassy Pub & Grill
2. Hot House Cafe
3. Bloor Street Diner
4. Pulp Kitchen
5. The Looking Glass
6. Rouge
7. Loons
8. Cora's Breakfast and Lunch
9. Mildred Pierce Restaurant
10. Murphy's Law

From Toronto.com

Persian bloggers to be on BBC World

Apparently, Miranda Eeles of the BBC World Service in Tehran has been making a video report about Iranian bloggers recently. I suspect the piece would focus on the the topic of internet in Iran and weblogs would be only a part of it.

I'm badly looking forward to watching it on BBC World. It would be the most important press that Persian weblogs have ever had. Let's see how she's packaged it.

BBC's The Word on Blogging

The edited audio version of The Word's interview with Stuart Hughes and me is online now for a week. Stuart had previously put the unedited and complete version of it on his own blog.

Jill Walker also talks about the fascinating idea of using blogs in creating fiction in the program.

World66 and ethical question

I don't see the point to write for World66 for free while they are making good money out of Google Adsense ads on their pages. This may eventually act against their whole idea as people don't feel comfortable contributing to them.

It's not ethical to earn money from people's free contribution, is it?

A year ago Sina was arrested on this day

Last year on this day Sina Motallebi, a blogger friend of mine, was arrested -- on his 30th birthday. The news shook and shocked the blogosphere, making it to the first place at the Blogdex list of most popular links.

After three weeks of intense pressure by the blogosphere and hence the mainstream media, he went out of jail on a condition: to remain silent, no matter what happens.

During the next couple of months he was under such psychological pressure by the judiciary's intelligence officials that he was even afraid of being mentioned anywhere -- in fact, he had asked me a couple of times, by sending secret Yahoo emails, to remove the posts on my Persian blog where I had mentioned his name, or at least remove his name from it.

As a career journalist and a blogger, he was not allowed to write anything, anywhere unless it be a sort of regretful piece, dismissing his own thoughts and deeds as a reformist journalist. He suffered about 10 months until he secretly decided to leave Iran with his family for good.

Now, in a small city in Netherlands, he is learning a whole new language and culture, and experiencing a completely new thing: freedom of speech

Nedstats is down, so are many blogs

Only when Nedstats server is down, like today, one can see how many Iranian blogs depend on it. Many of them do not open easily today, especially those who have placed Nedstat in a Table or on the begining of their page.

Editor: Myself is Feedster's feed of the day

Feedster has kindly selected this blog as their feed of the day. At the same time noticed that they've launched a long sought after Feed-to-Email service, alternative to the great Bloglet which posts email alerts based on the public feeds.

I just wish that Bloglet admin could provide the option to import/export the list of subscribers. I'm even willing to pay for such service since I have a big list of subscribers to my Persian blog and there is no way I can keep a backup of the list.

Bloggercon notes - Blogging as Business

Genereal problem for busniess on the Net in Iran:

• People in Iran have no access to any Internatioanlly accepted credit cards

• Iranians advertisers are far away from getting the power of Net advertising

But anyway, I did ahve Google ads on my persian blog, but it didn't work out well. Google doesn't support Persian content so they needed me to have at least 50% English content on my page. I did it, but the ads were very low-valued because the keywords were not exspensive enough. (Mainly iran etc.)

Then they changed the entire system so only charity ads were shown on mine since the begining of April. Therefore I turned to BlogAds. But Blogads has only been good for popular political blogs from the US. I don't have that market for my Persian blog, so I've tried to target unknown bloggers to sell them BlogAds. Still testing this one too.

Brainstorming at Bloggercon - International blogging

Very sketchy. Will re-write it later:

• We need tools that index popular posts based on languages. And then initiatives to get them translated.

• English bloggers in other countries do not represent the average internet users.

• Two challenges: 1. Create local blogosphere in local languages 2. Get bilingual local bloggers to blog in English too. For this respect, we can get English teaching institutes to promote blogs among their students.

• An Arabic blogosphere is not very hard to make. Zeyad and Salam pax should start promoting Arabic blogs. I mean in Arabaic, not English.

• We should promote Unicode standard among English speaking programmers. Many tools do not work well with Unicode and this sucks.

• Email is very crucial in developing countries and it beats censorship. Bloglet-like services should be expanded. They send out emails including favorite weblog posts everyday using their RSS feeds. (I have over 5,000 subscribers to my blog through Bloglet amazing service. See the list here. many of them are Iranian websites.)

• We should have more of these conferences in audio-style or IRC. More regular, more structured.

• If local celebrities, journalists, and politicians start blogging, it accelarete the speed of the process.

• Mainstream media can start some radio programs reading blogs, either English ones or translations of them. Radio is the best medium to promote blogs with.

• Young journalists who have their own blog, can change the attitude of the mainstream media towards blogging. We already doing it in Iran. Shargh newspaper covers blogs almost everyday.

• There could be some radio shows only based on people's voice messages reading their own blogs.

• Google should provide real-time search for Blogspot and even other weblogs absed on their RSS feeds or other things.

• Iranian vice-president is blogging. He loves blogs and posts everyday on his. His mobile photos are amazing. What politician in the world is this cool to take and post mobile photos in his/her blog?

• Photoblogs can be very helpful, especially for those who can't write in English very well but are wealthy enough to get a digital camera and a big hosting space. We should promote them.

• Liberal US bloggers should pay attention to internatinal blogging. It's not out of their agenda to enlighten people and to get Bush administration out of the white house. Have you ever seen a single mention of internatinal blogs in Talking points Memo or Echaton etc.?

Notes from a distance - Presidential bloggers

While I'm listening to the audio webcast, I post some of my comments here:

Candidate should blog him/herself?

I guess so. Blogs can help them show their human side as a normal person in differenet social roles: husband, father, son, brother, friend, etc. TV can't show these roles or if they do, they look like more of a show-off than a genuine thing.

Blogs vs. Cable TV

Blog are words and TV is image. As an outsider, I see that many people in America can easily be driven by images than words, like most other people in the modern world. Dean didn't have an image, he had lots of words. This is exactly why Al-Jazeera is really frightening: it's using image agianst image.

Political effect of blogs in other countries

Blogs in Iran, I think, are not directly affecting the society, because only 10% of people have Internet access. But it affects some influential refference groups such as journalists, students, and even politicians.

Bloggers running for office

I tried to use my blog as a basis for a kind of symbolic nomination for the parliament's election this year. But the whole election crisis changed the whole game. My goal was to initiate a sort of debate around some very important topics which have never been discusses or even existed in candidate's platforms to show the Iranian politicians and the world what people really want from them.

Some friends and I had plans to launch a website in which ordinary Iranian could announce candidacy and talk about their plans and platforms so we could affect the election days debates and atmosphere by injecting new ideas and plan to the political sphere. But then everything was destroyed by the Gaurdian Council which disqualified almost all reformist candidates and lowered the debate to very basic questions of democracy. We wanted to show the reformists "this is what people care, not your conservative nonsense". But the very reformists were thrown out of the game.

Anyway, I think blogs in Iran, despite the low number of Internet users, are wide-spread and well-known and a popular blogger can enter the politics on the basis of his/her blogosphere credibility and polpularity. Not as the main campagining tool, but as an organizing and networking tool and also as a basis to convinve political groups to put his/her name in their shortlist.

Watch it while you are missing it

Not being able to attend a conference and meet some amazing people there because of Visa problems is frustrating. Following it through audio webcast and IRC is upsetting -- You are missing this whole thing. Watch it! Watch what you are missing, you "Axis of Evil"-er!