April 29, 2003
Digital Satelite Channels in Iran
Aslan writes about Iranian Satelite TVs in Iran now:
These days Iranians can buy digital satellite dishes, which will get the signals of around 180 channels. Most of them are from non-English speaking European countries; there are a few music channels, few movie channels, and some adult channels. Although not everyone can afford to have these dishes, and although not everyone is comfortable to keep this illegal thing in their house; however, the number of people who get it, is rising day by day. It's amazing for me to hear that my friend, back in Iran, has heard and seen Kylie Minouge's latest single sooner than me in Canada!
Internet Access Cards
I haven't had a chance to post new pictures from my last trip to Iran for quite a while. So here you again. By the way, you can find all of them in photos section.
Internet cards, very similar to long distance phone cards, are the being sold everywhere in Iran. Privately-run ISPs distribute them. Each card includes a secret username and password and a phone number to call. There have different prices, based on their time limit. i'm not sure about their prices though. (Anybody knows it?)
April 28, 2003
Wired, ignorant or just lazy
I really wonder why Wired News totally seems to ignore the non-English language blogosphere. Are they ignorant or just lazy?
Day 8 of Sina's arrest; ethical dillema of Journalism in Iran
Sina said to Iranian Students News Aganecy (ISNA) he was hopeful that the court was going to accept his explanations and even woudn't take him to the court. He was worried that some people's support, might make new problems and new questions for him in the interogation process. He sounded confident and calm, but as I said, worried. He talked to ISNA while he appeared in a court in Mehrabad Airport (!) for the first time after a week of being in costudy.
Sina at work in Hayat-e No daily which was closed down a few months ago
This is what makes it complicated in Iran, nobody really knows if his/her support would help the detainee or hurt him/her more. I think Mark Glaser's piece for OJR is the first western journalist who has written more about this dillema which in fact challenges journalists ethics and principles.
Actually Sina was involved in such a dillema once himself, when he was working in Neshat daily. (Neshat was a replacement for Jameah dialy which was closed down after about a year. The same team were running it.) Sina has close relations to a well-known director called Masoud Kimiaie, who had made a few films very critical of the new technocrat mayor of Tehran, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, who was vey unpopular among traditional fractions of hard-liners. Also he had made another movie admiring intelligence agents of Iran and had tried to show a humane and tolerant face of them.
After it proved that the members of the intelliegence ministry of Iran had murdered some writers and opposition leaders in Iran, Sina wrote that Kimiaie, had relations with Saeed Emami, the chief of those inetl. agents who killed the writers--and killed himself in prison during the interogation process. Sina wrote that Kimaie's last films (Soltan, Ziafat, were made with great amount of support and help from Said Emami.
Then the editor-in-chief, Mahmoud Shamsolvaezin, who had close relations with Kimiaee, fired Sina after it got published and created huge controversy in the days after Emami's suicide. Shamsolvaezin then wrote an unusual column in the A&E page of the paper condemning Sina of reporting unconfirmed reports and defended Kimaiee in a personal way.
Sina responded to him a few days later in an article which was published in the same paper that he had done his profession and although he had close personal relations with the director, journalistic ethics didn't allow him to ignore this important piece of news.
In many Iranian people's minds, there is still a huge gap between what is "right" and what is "appropriate". It shows itself through different incidends such as Sina's arrest as well.
April 26, 2003
Three years go...
Three years ago, on these days, I was sitting down with technical manager of Khordad newspaper which was just a street south of Asr-e Azadegan - the newspaper where I used to write a daily column. Khordad daily had the best website among all 15,16 newspaper that were being published in Iran those day. he was explaining how they upload the updated database very night and how the database is updated everynight.
Suddenly somebody called him, he left the room and got back a few seconds later. He apologized and continued to talk, but his face was wierd and he was acting strangely. I don't remember what I asked that he quietly told me that the newspaper is closed down and they don't need to worry about upload the new files. I was shocked. All 13 reformist papers were ordered to shut down in a single ungly letter that was faxed to all of them by the justice department of Tehran . Asr-e Azadegan was among them too.
Now after three years, everything has changed. People don't tend to buy papers, don't like to talk politics and don't like the man they voted anymore. Moreover, almost all of their top journalists, from the owners, editor-in-chief, columnists, satirists, cartoonists, reporters, stringers, and even some marketing agents, have been arrested and have spended some time in jail since then--from several decades to a few weeks.
Although many of them are free now, but virtually none of them are politically active. Since then, hardliners have made up huge files, containing every possible accusation they might have come up, for about every possible man or women who might have been of a little influence on the society, by his or her thoughts, writings, speeches and actions.
The last part is the worst of it, during all this time that handsome president thet we chose, two times, has been silently watched all this and have been kept giving all of them legitimacy. This is the most painful part...
April 24, 2003
Sina in prision - Day 4
Nothing new about Sina. After a few days of shock, many bloggers have started to post again. Although many of them were very active supporting him with wrting about him and putting up the banner that calls for his release, some well-known bloggers who use their real names are a bit frightened. Some of them have only put up the banner without anything about him and a few of them have not mentioned a sinlge word about him, fearing of risking their jobs in mainstream media.
Important development is a letter to the president which is written on behalf of "a number of bloggers and internet users". The letter is published in reformist-run websites such as Rouydad or Emrooz and i think they are going to use it as a political means to show the negative outcomes of such arrestes on the young generations.
Eyeranian
Pedram Moallemian has a new weblog, called "Eyeranian". Nice name pal!
Sina on OJR
Online Journalism Review, Mark Glaser: "When Iran detained journalist and blogger Sina Motallebi, it stirred up a protest that's united the Persian and Western blogospheres. But will publicity help or harm him? Top Persian bloggers weigh in."
April 22, 2003
Sina's arrest - update
- He has a lawyer now. Association for Iranian journalists has appointed a lawyer for him. (NEW)
- Sina has come home with some officers. They wanted to obtain some more documents, maybe his PC, books, notes, videos, etc.
- Former deputy of Interior minister, Mostafa Tajzadeh, has condemned the arrest and said that why do they make young people angry with these kind of actions.
April 21, 2003
bad news coming
More bad news are coming these days in Iran: daily paper, "Arya", which was to be re-published is banned; some other young female reporters (including Masoumeh "Masih" Alinejad) are in court, and many others that I can't remember now. Seems to me that hard-liners have started a new wave of pressure and this time they are targeting young journalists and activists. (I'm not inthe mood to link to them now)
I have no idea why they are doing that while U.S forces are now on both sides of Iran (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and their threat to the regime is more than ever. Are they trying to ommit the whole reformist or opposition from the scene? Are they encouraging U.S. to challenge Iran millitarily so they can close down all semi-democratically elected institutions? Do they really think they can afford resisting against Americans?
Make no mistake, I am totally against any millitary action against Iran, but I can't ignore so many comments that i get in my Persian weblog from ordinary people, saying that they'd rather Americans than Mullas rulling them. Maybe they are having very times when they are saying this, but this is a fact that people are extremely tired of everything in Iran now.
"Free Sina Motallebi" petition
Pedram has prepared a petition. Please sign it and tell you friends to sign it. Youcan also use the following banner which is linked to the petition at: http://www.petitiononline.com/sina/April 20, 2003
Iranian blogger/journalist arrested
PETITION: Sign the petition please
Sina Motallebi, well-known blogger and journalist was arrested this morning. He is accused of threatening the national security by giving interviews to Persian language radios outside Iran, wrtiting articles both in newspapers and his weblog.
His weblog, WebGard (i.e. web surfer), was among the top 5 Persian most popular weblogs while his wife, Farnaz, has her own weblog, mostly writing about their newly-born baby boy, Mani.
Sina used to write film reviews for Iranian film magazines in the begining of his career, then joined the reformist paper of Jameah and continued to work with reformist papers. He was the political news editor in Ham-Mihan newspaper which only lasted a few months.
His father, Saeed Motallebi, who is a respected and experienced screenwriter, has been unofficially banned from working after the revolution because of his films in pre-revolution years.
Update: Reporters without Borders has the news
April 19, 2003
Price of a Logotype change
Adweek: "The redesign is the Atlanta company's first in 43 years and will involve changes on thousands of vehicles, more than 250 aircraft, 1,700 facilities, 70,000 drop-off and retail boxes, and more than 1 million uniforms. The entire changeover should be completed by 2009."
April 17, 2003
Naan Sangak
In Hayat-e No daily paper's office, which was banned from publishing a few months later, with hot and fresh Sangak bread and Iranian cheese and cucembers.
April 15, 2003
Iranian bloggers
(More pictures inside)
Want to see how Iranian bloggers look like? Here you go... One-day trip to North of Iran.
Want to see how Iranian bloggers look like? Here you go... One-day trip to North of Iran.
Welcome to Tehran, Ms. Kidman
The only official theatre that plays foreign films in Tehran is Cinema Farhang in north of Tehran, which has specified it's last show on about 9PM. The Others was on screen at the time last year and young people in large groups went to see it.
Peykan
You have no idea how much my aunt's husband loves his 30-year-old, well-maintained Peykan. Peykan was the natinal Iranian car for more than 20 years and it is still produced with almost the same design.
April 11, 2003
Professional Forces
BBC News: "A private in the Marine Corps is paid $1,022.70 a month. They receive free housing on base, and have 30 days leave a year."blogdex discrimination
I'm almost sure that blogdex has dropped out my weblog and possiblly as many other Persian weblogs as possible from it's database. The reason could be that they don't want their list includes non-english links that neither them nor the viewers understand them. Although I know that my weblog is phisically there, since blogdex says it is in the system already. But I can't see my weblog's name in the citations list for the links that I've pinted to.April 10, 2003
Khomeinism/Khoiesm in Iraq
Today's assasination of Majid Khoie, Ayatollah Khoie's son who is not a fan of Iranian leaders at all, will eventually increase the gap between Khomeinism and Khoiesm in Iraq. Shitte people in Iraq seems to be not very close to the Iranian supported fraction of exiles like Ayatollah Hakim. I think after a breif struggle of power in the vacuume period, they apparently won't accept Iranian-backed clerics and will finally be independent.
The only thing that worries me know is that Iranian people would suffer from the irreleative decision of their fanatic leaders to intervene in Iraq's political future and to impose their fans to Iraqi people. What can we do to stop them?
April 9, 2003
Unnecessary fear of another Khomeinism in Iraq
Saddam is gone and I am extremely happy. He was our (as an Iranian) greatest enemy and although Bush administration is a bigger threat to the world than Saddam, it doesn't neccessarily mean that bad will can not do good. Whatever happens to Iraqi people is far better than a beast like Saddam.
Also I am very happy that Tony Blair is with there with Bush and he doesn't let the arrogant Hawks do whatever they want to do.
The only thing here is that I think there is no need to worry about Iran and it's influence on the future of Iraq. History has proven that ecxept for Hizbollah which had a releatively legitimate reason to be so fanatic, Shiite Muslims are much more flexible and tolarant than Sunni people. If any Iraqi only visits Iran once, he/she will see that there is no anti-western feeling in Iran as the most Shiite country in the region. So how could they be anti-western when their ideolgical leader is not like that?
Don't worry about a few fanatic leaders who rule Iran right now. Even Shitte Iraqi opposition groups know that they can not count on them. They are quite aged and unpopular, without any clear future.
Moreover, Shitte chief clerics whose main base has always been the city of Najaf in southern Iraq, have been very calm and conservative during the past decades. Khomeini was an exception and even at the time, he was not very popular in Iraq among other top clerics like Ayatollah Khoie and others. Shitte people in Iraq, no matter who is actually leading them, Iranians or their own chief clerics, are not ideologically anti-western. Even I could say that if it was not for the influence of commuinst parties and ideology in Iran at the time of 1979's revolution, Khomeini's regime had never been so anti-western. This requires a lot of historical reasoning that I might do later.
Therefore if as BBC commentator said we see pictures of Khomeni in Iraqis hands soon, this shouldn't not be seen as a threat. Let them do what they have been prevented to do for 30 years, they are not as dangerous as Pakistani and Saudi wahabies. Iraq is more like Iran than it's big neighbour Saudi Arabia.
Update: I just found this article in Washington Monthly which confirms some of my thoughts here. I quote a small part of it:
The theocracy espoused by Khomeini was a novel perversion even of Shia Islam, let alone the Sunni variant to which the vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere adhere. "velayat-i faghi," the notion of a religious leader holding supreme political power, was given a very sniffy reception by theologically more eminent Shia figures, such as Grand Ayatollah al-Khoie, venerated religious leader of the 12 million Iraqi Shia. Thus, when Khomeini reached out to subvert his Iraqi co-religionists soon after taking power, few of them heeded his call. In fact, the Iraqi Shia fought tenaciously for Saddam Hussein against the Iranians over eight bloody years. The Shia of Saudi Arabia never posed much of a threat to the monarchy and were eventually bought off.
April 8, 2003
I censor, because I'm poor
Ehsan, a Tehran-based Bloggers writes that some Iranian ISPs have banned users to access Nedstat, a free stats server that bloggers use to track the number of their visitors. They get the following message:
Access to this web page is restricted at this time.
Reason:
Forbidden, this page (http://www.nedstatbasic.net/) is categorized as: Sex.
Generated Mon, 31 Mar 2003 19:16:17 GMT by cache4 (Squid/2.4.STABLE6)
Later on, Hamid explains that this happens because they are using a free software, called Squid, in order to filter inappropriate websites. Since they use an inaccurate open-source blacklist wich is freely published as well, this website is categorized as a porn site and it is banned.
April 7, 2003
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.
April 3, 2003
Daughter of Iran Revolution Struggles Against the Veil
NYTimes: 'No matter that her grandfather [ayatollah Khomeini" condemned music shortly after the revolution as "no different from opium" because it "stupefies persons listening to it and makes their brains inactive and frivolous." "I still sometimes sing at home and dance," Ms. Eshraghi said. "I can't kill those feelings."' I have heard from close friends that she has a weblog in Persian, which knowbody knows it's name or URl.Kaveh Golestan dies
Kaveh Golestan, well-known photograpger and documentary maker was killed yesterday after stepping on a landmine. He was a Pulitzer winner for his photos of ranian revolution days back in late 1970s. he was the son of Ebrahim Golestan, one of the most well-known film directors whose film, "Brick and Mirror" had a great impact on the whole film industry in Iran. Kaveh was working with BBC correspondent, Jim Muir in Tehran, and at the same time he was teaching in Azad University in Tehran. Many of young Iranian photographers such as Shadi Ghadirian and many others whose works are in Kargah, are his students.