Through the amazing Ishkur guide to electronic music, I discovered this wonderful song by Golden Boy and Miss Kittin called "Rippin", and I really can't get enough of it.
Here is the quickest website I've ever built: blogsbyiranians.com
It's a directory of almost all of the English weblogs written by Iranians around the world, many from inside Iran. Making it came to my mind the other day when I was writing that piece for the Varsity and I thought there was no separate directory for English blogs by Iranians. So I bought a domain right away and set up a website using wonderful Blogrolling.com.
I noticed that the Varsity has published the draft version of my article. Here is the final version which is a little different with the published version.
By Hossein Derakhshan*
Having lived almost all my life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I've always wanted to see the West and why Islamic clerics in Iran dislike its values and lifestyle so much.
Before I came to Toronto as an immigrant in Dec. 2000, I was working as a tech journalist in one the so called reformist papers in Iran. A daily column named "Internet" with a simple, straight-forward language had attracted a lot of readers whose emails were making my yahoo email account full every day. The pleasure of helping people discover new things and cross new borders is the most satisfying experience anyone can have.
But then everything suddenly changed when the hardliner-backed judiciary closed down all reformist papers in one night.
After a few months, I received the visa and came to Canada, completely disconnected from a rapidly changing society that I cared—and still care about.
You have no idea how much a high-bandwidth Internet connection helped me at the time. Having worked –or been tortured, better put- by slow modem connection, I could finally see and feel the real potentials of the Internet. Through all that pointless but joyful surfing, I came across to a website that later changed my work and life: Blogger.com
I started my own weblog in Persian a few days later and started to attract dozens of old readers of my column again. Then many people asked me to show them how to do the same thing, therefore, on 25 Sep. 2001 I wrote a simple step-to-step guide on how to build a weblog in Persian. Suddenly in less than a year, weblog became one of the hottest issues among Internet savvy Iranians all over the world.
Weblogs are powerful bridges in a widely divided society. Bridges between immigrants and homeland inhabitants, girls and boys, parents and children, and especially between journalists and writers who were not able to publish their works freely in the politically closed atmosphere in Iran and their thirsty readers.
Tens of thousands of Persian weblogs now attract millions of readers everyday, but the language barrier has prevented the world from seeing the real Iran and its people through them. A quick study of the contents of these weblogs displays a whole new set of attitudes and values among Iranian young people, absolutely different with what mainstream North American media tries to sketch.
New generation of Iranian young people are more tolerant, self-expressive, independent, and individualistic than ever. In an increasingly anti-American--and to some extent anti-Western--region of Middle East, where fanatic Islam has the most fans among middle-class population, Iranians embrace extremely different values than their neighbour countries, and surprisingly, than their fanatic leaders.
Salam pax, the Iraqi blogger who was the only genuine and direct voice from inside Iraq during the foggy days of war, could change many people's mind about the life in Baghdad. Now while Iranian fundamentalist regime is under serious pressure by the world community for it's nuclear programs, human rights issues and support of terrorism, Iranians who write their weblogs in English provide the best tools for the world to separate the fanatic government from a rarely educated and rational society in the Middle East.
Luckily, aside from tens of thousands of weblogs in Persian, there are over a hundred of weblogs in English language, many of them written by people who live inside Iran.
As for my own personal experience, I can't be happier as I see thousands of people log on to my Persian weblog, Editor: Myself. By reading their emails and comments on my posts, I have re-discovered my faithful readers that I had missed for a long time, this time without having a printed newspaper or even someone who edits my writings. I'm my own editor. Every blogger is his or her own editor.
For more on weblogs by iranians check out blogsbyiranians.com
* Hossein Derakhshan is an undergrad student in department of Sociology. He maintains uoftblogs.com, a directory of weblogs by UofT students and staff.
Yesterday was a good day for me. First it was our 4th anniversary, then my first writing in English was published in the Varsity, UofT's magazine, and finally I talked to someone in my Quantitative Analysis class. Oh, by the way, we have to use SPSS on Unix for all of our excercises in this course which is very fun. I like all those X, ^U, ^V, ^E, and Gs there!
"The couple's (lopez and Afleck) 21-month-old love story is arguably Hollywood's most closely-watched union since that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the 1960s." (Source: BBC News
| Online | Scientific | |
| Yes | 19% | 44% |
| No | 78% | 50% |
| Don't know | 2% | 6% |
Seems to me that people like being popular as much as they want popular things. In the age numerous options, people don't bother thinking about how to choose things very much. They are more likely to choose what other people have chosen.
That's why you can see a lot of listings that gather particular items based on their popularity. Best examples are Yahoo's most emailed news and most emailed images, NYTime's most emailed articles, Blogdex, etc.
Now imagine a restaurant menu that lists the popular foods everyday with some kind of quantitive index. The menu can be updated everyday or maybe in the future, thanks to durable and foldable LCDs, in real-time.
I would definitely try it if I had my own cafe or restaurant.