Blogtalk Paper

Here is my accepted proposal to BlogTalk conference in Wien, Austria:

Weblogs, an Iranian perspective

By Hossein Derakhshan*

During the past 20 months, more than 10,000 Persian weblogs have been emerged. Their authors mostly live in Iran, where the number of Internet users hardly exceeds a half million. This means that blogging is extremely popular, even comparing with developed countries, this ratio (0.02%) is quite unusual.

These webloggers, including many young women, write freely about a wide range of topics, from personal diaries to social and political criticism. However, many of them do not use their real names.

Some specific genres can be recognized among them, such as: poetic and literate, technological and computer-related, soft-pornographic, personal diaries, political criticism and activism, etc.

The popularity of weblogs among young Iranians, suggests that great changes has happened in Iranian society during the past two decades, at least among the new generations of middle-class residents of big cities. It shows that they are carrying new values and promoting new lifestyles, which is very rare among older generations, who were trying to hide their personal feelings and opinions from the others. Individuality, self-expression, tolerance are new values which are quite obvious through a quick study of the content of Persian weblogs.

Weblogs have functioned in numerous ways for different parts of Iranian internet users:

• They have provided first-hand reports from several events such as students protests;
• they have helped young people find new dates or know more about potential dates, in lack of legitimate dating services;
• they have helped parents to get to know more about their children’s values and norms;
• they have provided Iranian immigrants outside of Iran with first-hand information about the new and unofficial Iran (new values, new lifestyle, new slang etc.);
• some of well-known webloggers have been hired by newspaper publishers to write for them, something they had never had a chance;
• they have attracted several of top officials and politicians as their regular reader, in some cases they have commented on some posts in some weblogs;
• they have popularized the concept and use of utf-8 standard as the ultimate standard for putting Persian texts on the Net;
• they have hugely increased the total volume of searchable Persian content on the Internet, both directly by their own content, and indirectly by popularizing the idea of full utf-8-friendly Persian websites;
• they have shifted the attention of many young users from chat-rooms toward reading and writing weblogs;
• they have encouraged a number of groups of webloggers to gather and publish e-zines (such as Cappuccino, a weekly e-zine with more than 50,000 visitors per month) based on their experiences as webloggers.

The tools which Iranian webloggers tend to use consist of "Blogger" and "Persianblog", which functions very similarly to Blogger and is completely developed in Iran. Moreover, "ASPRider", a decentralized tool that is run on users own servers and requires ASP and SQL to run, is becoming popular. (Win32 web servers are much more popular among Iranian hosting companies.)

There are a few other tools that have been created around the idea of weblogs, for example there are a number of tools to list and organize Persian weblogs (such as Blognama.com), there is a client-side application to notify regular readers about updated weblogs, etc.

Enabling readers to post comments publicly, placing counters to track the number of visitors, and using pictures and background music, are among other popular trends.

Most popular weblogs have an average of 3,500 visitor per day and 100,000 per month. Almost 60% of visitors of popular weblogs come from Iran and others come from North America, Europe and Asia.

Hossein Derakhshan, aka hoder, is a journalist and multimedia developer. He has written about techincal and cultural aspects of Internet in "Asr-e Azadegan" an "Hayat-e No" dailies, before he immigrated to Canada on Dec 2000. His Persian online diary (weblog), "Sardabir: Khodam", has inspired many Iranians to publish their own weblogs on the Net. He keeps an English weblog as well. He now lives with his wife in Toronto.