October 29, 2003
Café Blog in Tehran
I'm not sure if there is any Cafe for bloggers in other cities, but there is one in Tehran. Actually it's recently opened in a northern area of Tehran and Ive heard that it's quite popular among Tehranian bloggers. It's called Cafe Blog and based on the website, they held some basic technical workshops for their members. There are some photos from their opening on their website. Although a friend have promised me to give some good quality photos. Maybe we can publish it in Wired magazine, in their photo section that I don't remember its name. Does anyone have a good connection with them?
I wish I could have a trip to Iran this year. But it's too dangerous these days.
More:
- For a list of Iranian blogs in English language, visit Blogs by Iranians
- Some more photos from Iranian bloggers and life in Tehran
Photos courtesy of CafeBlog and Vaheed.com. I also thank Nima for the new photos.
October 22, 2003
post to Blogs by Iranians side-blog
I've added a side-blog to the Blogs x Iranian wesbite. But there is difference here with other side-blogs: you can post to it too.
Only if you are Iranian and you have a weblog, you are welcome to post to it. Choose a favorite recent post of your blog and send a TrackBack to the URL specified on the webiste. You'll see that the title of your post along with a brief excerpt, will appear on the side-blog.
October 21, 2003
Online suicide bombing
Hey you stupid muslim fanatics! Stop terrorizing the Net. If you really have something to say, say it. Suicide bombing online or offline does not help your regiliously-flavored political goals.
Your recent cyber attacks made my website unreachable for hours, as long as many other websites. I'm neither American, nor Jewish. I am a Muslim-born blogger from Iran who is a victim of fanatic Islam both in his own country and, seemingly, in the West.
How would you want your children to live after you destroyed everything?
October 20, 2003
Google doesn't like some languages
Google has ordered me to remove AdSense banners from my bilingual weblog. Actually, for a long time, I've been adding a brief summary for every single post I've written in Persian to make it legible for English speakers as well. Now Google, which uses those summaries to index my pages, says that it doesn't accept them as "primarily English" pages.
By this argument, what a popular Korean-English website should do? Does it have to be punished because it's just a bi-lingual website?
Installation art by Blaine
I just think, despite all the controversy, David Baline's stunt act in London was a great example of installation art. I may explain it later.
October 17, 2003
sick of this look
I'm sick of the look of my English blog. It looks so amature and ugly. I changed my Persian blog's design and I am still constanly changing small things in it. But I haven't been able to spend time on this weblog which could be even more important that my Persian blog; both in terms of the potential audience and in terms of the money that it can make because of the market it is targeting: English speaking people who are curious about Iran and Iranians both inside and outside Iran.
Anyways, I am trying to launch an Iran-focused collective news blog in a few days. You'll be informed about it here.
October 16, 2003
Omid Kordestani should know that AdSense fails Unicode (utf-8)
Finally got approved by AdSense guys and put a banner in my Persian and English blog. It hasn't been that bad. I made $5 yesterday and maybe the same today.
But the thing is that blogs are not valuable keywords in terms of Google marketability, so are anything related to Iran, Persians etc. Part of it is because Internet in Iran is still very very young. There are only about 3 million Internet users out of the 75 million population.
The other big reason which could be even more important the latter, is that, believe it or not, there is no major or minor international credit card company operation in Iran. So even if you are a rich, upper-class Tehranian and you want to buy, say, a T-shirt online, you simply have to forget it. Unless you have a friend or relative who has a credit card since he travels a lot.
So when your content is based in a big but virtually poor market, 4 bucks a day is kind of amazing. However I should start to think about some new ideas for niche blogs. Let's see what I can come up with.
By the way, Google AdSense seems to have problems displaying ut-8 characters in the ads. They all become question marks. I hope Omid Kordestani, the Iranian VP of Google, reads this and let the engineers know about it.
October 14, 2003
Shirin Ebadi must run for president
The huge crowd of Iranians who gathered in Tehran airport to cheer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made me think of her as the best possible leader of the opposition who can even run for presidency next term.
She is extremely popular among ordinary as well as educated people, is a woman who can attract the strongest support of women, is an experienced academic, lawyer, and a human rights activist, is a genuine reformist who opposes to radical change in Iran, and finally she is now a widely known and backed activist in the world (even the US president who has always favored a regime-change over a behavior-change strategy towards Iran) which gives her a great deal of immunity against hardliners, backed by Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.
Although I personally think she is more or less a conservative person in her political framework, she is actually far more radical than Khatami, the current president. The bottom line is that she believes in a secular government and she is backed and advised by a group of secular intellectuals.
The leader has previously proven fragile in a few occasions when the social and international pressure has been strong and he certainly is not tough enough to tolerate all this pressure again.
October 10, 2003
White Torture in Iran prisons
I'm not sure what do they do to journalist/writer prisoners in Iran that when they come out, they are completely different people. Most of them, not only stop writing, but also loose the sense of enthusiasm they used to have toward life and joy. For example Sina Motallebi has not written a single piece anywhere since then. Also I've heard that Kambiz Kahe, the pro-active film critic, is now a depressed and silent man.
This kind of white torture, as it's sometimes called, is much worse that ordinary ways of physical torture. Because in the latter, you'll proudly carry signs of your braveness and their crudeness on your body until you die. Moreover, you can show it to other people what they did to you because of your writings or activities. But when they break you down and make a silent, hopeless, and suicidal person of you, who doesn't have any bruise to be proud of or to show off, you'll be dead; in a way that costs the minimum political price for them.
October 7, 2003
Damasanj: Iranians' answer to Blogdex
Ahmad Anwari and I have launched a new website, named "Damsanj" (means Thermometer in Persian), which is a popularity index. In other words it's a blogdex for Persian blogosphere.
The website is entirely Persian, but bellow each title, it's URL is mentioned wich can give an idea of what the link is about to non-Persian speakers.
During the project, I was thinking that it would be amazing if anybody could make his or her popularity indexing application's source code open to public, or at least released it as a shareware or freeware software which you could install on your own server and by building your own list of URLs, you could find the most popular links among them everyday.
I guess small-scale popularity indices would be very needed soon for variant purposes: education, intelligence, marketing, journalism, etc.
October 4, 2003
I missed BloggerCon in Harvad because I'm Iranian
I'm so sad that I can't make it to BloggerCon in Harvard this weekend, although, thanks to Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer, a free ticket was waiting for me there.
The reason? I still haven't got my Canadian citizenship and have to use my Iranian passport, which, you know, is worse than not having a passport at all! The U.S. embassy in Canada needs at least three months to issue a visa for me as an Iranian citizen, for which I have to do a personal interview as well. (The same thing has stopped many Iranian filmmakers to enter the U.S recently.)
That's funny, because I'm missing the BloggerCon for the same reason I was invited: I am Iranian.
October 3, 2003
CNN removed controversial story on Iranian blogs
Believe it or not, CNN online has removed an entire story about Iranian blogs from it's website. (Even popdex has the list of websites that had linked to the piece) The story which originally was produced by Reuters made a lot of controversy in Iran among conservative officials and business owners. (Look at a this petition for example) Because it used to begin with a paragraph about a blog by an Irnian prostitue.
Although that particular blog tuned out to be fake, the story was quite good at displaying a general picture of why Iranian youth have turned to blogging.
There is a slight possibility that the page is re-located, but further search on CNN's website proves it wrong.
The original story on the Reuters is unavlable as well, which might be because they don't keep their whole archive online.
However, the story is still reachable through other websites.
October 1, 2003
Even Freehand MX 2004 does not support Unicode
Isn't it a shame that Macromedia Freehand MX 2004 does not support Unicode (UTF-8) yet? Maybe if we all request this feature, they'll notice that not all their users are English speakers.