Iranian blogs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blogging in Iran operates under special circumstances as the Iranian government tends to discourage self-expression. Blogs in general tend to be unregulated compared to other forms of expression in Iranian society. This characteristic can account for the huge popularity of blogs especially among Iranian youths. As of October 2005, there are estimated to be about 700,000 Iranian blogs (out of an estimated total of 100 million worldwide), of which about 40,000-110,000 are active , mostly written in Persian, the official language of Iran.

There are also many weblogs written by Iranians in English and other languages. Most of them, though, belong to expatriates who live in North America, Europe, Japan, etc. Blogs By Iranians keeps a list of Iranian blogs written in English. Iran is the fourth largest country of bloggers.

Contents

[edit] Timeline

[edit] 2001

  • 7 September - Salman Jariri publishes the first Persian blog using manual coding. His posts have no direct links, no place for readers' comments. [1]
  • 25 September - Hossein Derakhshan, a former journalist at a reformist newspaper starts his blog using manual coding.
  • 5 November - Hossein Derakhshan publishes instructions on "How to make a blog in Persian" using Blogger.com's free service, in response to readers' requests. [2]

[edit] 2002

[edit] 2003

    • 20 April - Sina Motallebi, journalist and blogger is arrested.
    • 26 September - Cafe Blog opens in north of Tehran.
    • 24 November - Mohammad Ali Abtahi, then Vice President for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, starts "Webnevesht", the first blog by a member of the Iranian cabinet.

[edit] 2004

  • 16 January - Protesting MPs on sit-in start a weblog.
  • 6 June - Persian Blogging festival starts.
  • November - Iranian blogger Mojtaba Saminejad arrested for writing about the arrests of three other bloggers

[edit] 2005

  • 5 January - Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's Chief prosecutor, ordered major ISPs to filter PersianBlog and other blogging service websites.
  • 27 January/12 February - Iranian blogger Mojtaba Saminejad briefly released, then rearrested
  • October Blog Herald estimate: 700,000 Iranian blogs, of which about 10% are active
  • 13 September - Mojtaba Saminejad is released from prison, after serving term.
  • 11 October - Blogging courses starts in the holy city of Qom, the traditional home of Iran's religious establishment. They are run by the newly-established office of religious weblog expansion. [3]

[edit] 2006

  • Persian language was listed by Technorati among 10 most common languages among bloggers.[4]
  • 14 August - President Ahmadinejad starts his multilingual blog with one long entry. [5]
  • December: Mehrnoush Najafi Ragheb won city council election in Hamedan.
  • 18 December: ARTICLE 19, launches an interactive campaign on internet censorship in Iran titled: The Persian Impediment.[www.persianimpediment.org] The campaign identifies the organizational system behind the censorship, assesses recent trends in Internet-related detensions, and provides an opportunity for an online discussion on, and action against, censorship.

[edit] Directories

  • Blogs by Iranians Directory of weblogs that Iranians write in English language, either from inside or outside Iran.
  • BlogFa The recently updated blogs on BlogFa.

[edit] Related books

  • We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs by Nasrin Alavi (Soft Skull Press /November 28, 2005) ISBN 1-933368-05-5
  • We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gilmor (O'Reilly, 2004) ISBN 0-596-00733-7

[edit] Academic papers

[edit] Media articles


[edit] Interesting facts

"Persian is now the fourth most widely used language on web logs." - The (UK) Times, 2004 [6].

[edit] See also

[edit] External links