Interview with Seyed Pouya Razavi, creator of BlogShares

When I saw his name I thought he might be Iranian. I sent him an email and he confirmed it. Pouya Razavi is the creator of BlogShares, fantasy stock market of weblogs. Here is an email interview with him:

What is your real Persian name? When did you move to the UK? A brief bio please.

My full name is Seyed Pouya Razavi-Nematollahi and I moved to the UK in the mid-1980s after living in a number of other places. I was born in Teheran, Iran in 1978.

I attended an undergraduate course reading Artificial Intelligence at UMIST which I left before completion to pursue commercial opportunities that were available to me then. I've since resumed part-time study to complete my degree whilst maintaining my professional career.

What other projects have you done before BlogShare?

A number of different projects for different companies mainly involving Internet and financial technologies. My most lengthy position was with "DooYoo", an Internet opinion portal , were I was the Chief Architect.

I am currently working as Systems Architect at a start-up company, iCOM Mobile, working on Interactive Voice Recognition and micro-payment services.

What motivated you to lauch BlogShares?

BlogShares came from some analysis I was doing on the nature of attention on the Web based on power law distributions. In the course, of doing the experiment I needed an algorithm to define the value of links and I borrowed my knowledge from how Google does it's PageRank. It wasn't an exact copy but used the same principal of determining authority of the linker based on the authority of people which link to him/her.

From there came the idea of a virtual stock market where players could invest in the popularity of weblogs or rather speculate on the shifts of attention within the network.

I wrote the system in less than two-weeks during my spare time, launched it and was surprised it found popularity amongst the many webloggers who publish on the Net. Since then it's been a rollercoaster ride in deliverying a finished system for people to enjoy.

How long have you been blogging? How did you discovered the idea of blogging and why did you like it?

I suppose I discovered blogging quite recently in April 2002 when I converted my website to a blog. Then it was just a matter of finding a place to put up the ideas and thoughts I had in a permament, public home. My first articles on the chances of peace in the Middle East and the nature of complexity were fundementally what I wanted to express.

However, since then I've been absorbed into the nature of the network that is blogging, the relationships between these nodes (blogs) and the emergence of a new form of communication called Social Software by some.

I'm still reading and learning from others on a daily basis and it still amazes me how much of mankind's collective knowledge is being exposed on the Internet. Weblogs is just one dimension of that but an important one in bringing local expertise and primary voices which go beyond raw facts and figures.

What is the business model behind BlogShares?

As it started out as an experiment and is currently just a hobby there was not much of a business model to begin with. When I launched I didn't expect to have the 3100+ players that are now active on the site after 12 days. So now I'm patching together means of supporting the site and deliverying a quality yet free service for the community.

In that effort my main strategy has been to put in place discrete advertising and offer players the opportunity to buy "premium" membership for advanced features when the site goes live.

There are other opportunities which I'll be exploring as time goes by but the main drive at this phase is to keep the project going without becoming a financial burden for myself. I do this for the joy and interest of it rather than to make myself rich :-)

How much is BlogShares internationalized? I mean for other languages.

Right now it's not. It's an interesting idea to internationalise it and I don't think it would be too difficult a task but there's no impetus for that at present.

Have you thought of separating BlogShares market into smaller markets based on the language each weblog is written in?

Again another interesting idea. There's some potential communities that this could work well upon if the costs of running such a service were somehow covered. However, I think it is nice to have a single system for all the world to share rather than partitioning things under language or national boundaries. I hope what I do would transcend such notions because the Internet clearly does. Now, that being said to really support the whole world I'd have to internationalise things. If the demand was there and the time was available it's something I'd certainly consider.

Do you think other tools should do the same thing? I mean separating their content analysis tools based on languages?

Well, BlogShares isn't a tool as such but a game with some interesting data behind it. So the same criteria doesn't really apply. However, I think multiple language support is a definite must for any tool that is to be adopted internationally. Whether you seperate the content at analysis or on delivery is a choice you'd have to make based on the function and nature of the tool.

Have you followed the Persian blogging movement? How did you first know about it?

I'm aware of the Persian blogging movement but I'm handicapped in not being able to read or write Farsi (although I can speak it fairly fluently). The political implications are hopeful and it's nice to see one's nationality represented so well in a domain you enjoy. I can't remember exactly where I first heard about Persian blogging, though.

Why do you think weblog is a so much of a catch in Iran, and not in other middle eastern countries?

I'm not sure if the last statement is true or not so I can't really comment. I can say that I suspect, based on my experience of Farsi, there is a beautifully expressive side of Iranian culture which has found it's medium perfectly. It may also have a lot to do with the situation in Iran where I believe there is a lot of young people, around my age, who are technically competent and in dire need for outlets for their ideas.

What are the strong points/ weak points of the Persian blogging community?

I'm not entirely sure I'm qualified to answer but I see a lot of strengths in the enthusiasm by which Persian bloggers have embraced the medium. It's proliferation as a form is astounding. Most of the weakness I see are temporary to do with the relative catching up to be done in terms of infrastructure and issues with potential censorship. The only thing I would really love to see more of, especially at these difficult times, is Persian bloggers engaging the global community more. Making their presence felt and engaging in the dialogue with others, particularly Americans, who may have misconceptions about the culture and people of Iran. I think dialogue is the best tool we have in avoiding the negative cycles of attention which Iran endures due to its location and resources.