To my surprise, Iranians are now the thrid biggest community in Orkut, after Brazil and the United States. Given the low ratio of Internet users in Iran (some 3m out of 70m of population) and the poor quality of their access (56Kbps is still the fastest), this is really interesting.
How can you explain it? Couldn't it be weblogs?
After getting the Rogers PVR yesterday and playing with it, now I see why everybody is so fascinated by TiVo in the States.
But I've come across two issues so far:
For a long time, many Canadians have wondered why TiVO has not operating in Canada. But now Rogers offers PVR (Persoanl Video Recorder) service, integrated with the regular digital box, for either a monthly rent of $19.95 per month, or a one-time purchase of it for $588.
According to the Rogers website, its PVR has these rare features:
HUB magazine has more detail about Rogers PVRs and their advantages over some similar services like from Bell ExpressVU.
There is also a report by a user experience studio, called Teehan+Lax, in which Bell and Roger's PVRs have been compared(PDF) in terms of user experience.
As for the recorder machine itself, which seems to be Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000, PVR Blog reports a wierd bug related to the leap year. It has also pointed to an interesting blog in which, Joe Clark, a technician, keeps track of his own Explorer 8000.
Some features of the Explorer 80000 include:
After I get my PVR tomorrow morning, the question for me would be whether to rent it or purchase it. I guess I'm going to rent it until an stable model comes out with minimum bugs.
Additional links:
- FutureShop sells three types of PVRs
- Explorer 8000 on Scientific Atlanta's official website
The most frustrating thing about Iranian nukes issue is that the voice of the Iranian public, either inside or outside Iran, is absolutely missing.
I've discussed this in my latest article for Free Thoughts on Iran, titled This is my fate they are talking about
An Iranian blogger who has just returened from the scene of devastating crash in south of Iran, which has led to at least 90 deaths, has posted some first-hand photos.
I'm quite happy to see that BBC plans to re-launch a satelite Arabic channel competing with widely popular Al-Jazeera. The British know the mid-east region better than anyone in the world and at the same time know how to affect the Arab educated audience.
But I doubt the new channel could attract less-educated Arabs of the world who actually make up the majority of them. They still going to watch Al-Jazeera which instead of spreading wisdom and giving insightful analyisi, fills Arabs hearts and minds with subtle anti-Western ideas and sentiments.
An effort to start an Arabic TV channel by the BBC had failed a few years ago.
Heavy new filtering has decreased my Persian weblog's readership from over 7,000 page views per day to about 5,000. Nothing is more painful than this.
The stupid hardline Iranians in TV can not understand how similar their pictures of capyired British sailors look to the picutres of Wahabist terrorsts before killing their hostages. They have also made many people remember the American hostage crisis in the early 80s in Tehran.
It has certainly damaged the positive image Iran has made for itself after the 9/11 by not getting invloved in any Al-Qaida activities.
One of my readers who says is an administrator of an ISP in Tehran, has sent the latest version of the blacklist Iranian Telecom has sent out to all ISPs.
Apparently this list only includes websites and weblogs in Persian language. There are CDs regularely sent out to ISPs that contain thousands of erotic websites in English that are not politically of much significance.
The new list includes many news websites not neccessarily related to radical and violent opposition groups, as well as many entertainment websites, weblogs, and some erotic blogs and websites.
I'd try to mark the major news websites among them.
I've been using BlogAds for a while but I should say that even though it's a great idea, it has a poor implementation.
I can't write a review on it right now, but what frustrates me most is the fact that I can't edit the ads people have submitted to me. For example, I can't accept some of the banners people submit either because they are bigger or smaller than my standard size, or they are simply ugly.
So if i want to change the banner with a new one, designed by me, I have no choice but to send the banner back to the owner and ask him or her to replace it with the older one. The same thing would happen if I want to change their wording a little bit.
Moreover, eventhough it works fine with Unicode, but since the default page encoding (maybe on the web server) is set to something other than Unicode, every time you want to change or see something in Persian, for example, you have to change the page encoding to Unicode -- it's such a pain.
Four months on, Yahoo hasn't fixed its RSS reader's problem with Unicode text. I had previousely written about the problem and it still exits.
Apparently Iranian Telecom and some other ISPs have filtered all Blogspot subdomains. Many users have confirmed it.
Update: Mehdi, a blogger from Qum, has confirmed it in his blog, among others.
In Weblog Festival's closing ceremony, deputy of IT ministery and head research institute raised some important things about blogs in Iran.
The former, Nassrollah Jahangard, wished that every Iranian could have a blog one day and expressed the government's support for persian blogs which, in his mind, are defining the presence of Iran on the Net and make an identity for the Iranian community on the Internet. He also added that blogs are sort of cultureal heritage for Iran and they will make the future of it.
The latter, Sohrab Razeghi, said that blogs and the values they carry with themseves are the begining of a modern society in Iran. He said that the openness, subversiveness, and a sense of individualism which are visible among Iranian weblogs are completely new things in the society. he then rejected the idea of government support and said that they should leave the persian blogoshpere alone and let it go in whatever direction it wants.
I'm actually surprised by mr. Razaghi's comments and believe that he is one the few officials who has really understood the nature of blogging and how it's been evolving in the Iranian online commuinity.
Many bloggers have commented abuot the three-day festival, but all of are in Persian, so there is no point to link to them. But there are many wonderful pictures of the festival: Set one, set two, set three, and set four.
There's also been a signifact amount of coverage in a dozen of news agencies and papers.
Both popular at home and extremly unpopular abroad, Ronald Regean and Ruhollah Khomeini had at least one hing in common. (--edited)
Here are some pictures from the first day of the Weblog Festival in Tehran.
The three-day festival titled "Iranian Youth, Weblogs and the Information Society" started today in Tehran.
In its opening, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a vice President of Iran, who himself is a blogger, said that the government should let bloggers write whatever they want.
Check out more reports in Persian before I write more about it.
A possible quake in Tehran which can lead to hundreds of thousands victims and maybe a complete political chaos, has captured Tehranians' minds since the last week's not-very-strong quake in North of Iran which was felt in Tehran as well.
Rumors that some scientists have predicted a higher possibility of this quake to happen in the coming days, has really created a sense of fear and panic among Tehranian.
Just by reading the last posts by many Persian blogs will give you a sense of how worried and frightened they feel these days. Many has even left Tehran for a safe place.
This has almost sidelined all the political news about the new parliament, Chalabi's connection with Iran, etc.