Reading the account of the doctor who had examined the body Zahra Kazemi after her tragic death, I think it'd be very stupid of me to go to Iran without two things:
The first one is not very difficult with the help of the blogging community. But for the press card, I'd need credentials from a Canadian magazine or newspaper or CBC or whatever.
Please let me know if you can help.
I can't believe that Mostafa Moeen, the reformist presidential candidate from the Iran Participation Front party, not only reads my blog, but also react to it -- swiftly.
Ali Pirhosseinlou, a Tehranian blogger who works with Moeen's campaign, said to me the other day that Moeen had read my rant about how important it is for a candidate to at least be able to run his small website properly, and had become very mad at people in charge of his official blog.
He has also dedicated his third entry to explain the reason of his weblog's outage and how these things are important to him.
It feels good to be influencing someone who could be the next president of Iran just by a simple weblog. Let's see if we can get more candidates to blog.
I'm loving it.
Here is a sketchy version of what I'll be talking about in BlogNashville conference in May 2005. It's based on my experience in making and keeping togethere the Persian blogosphere in the first few months.
By Hossein Derakhshan
The success of Iranians in creating a hyper-active blogosphere in their own language could be implemented by other developing countries. Weblogs have had social, political, and journalistic functions in Iran, a country run by an authoritarian, Islamic regime. Studying the process of forming such online community can help many in developing countries to shape their own version of blogosphere.
Someone should start it first; preferably a well-known figure among tech-savvy users. She should reside in the country or at least haven't lost connection with the society, culture and daily lives of the people in her homeland.
No one would have an idea about weblogs if she couldn't see it. Only writing a daily weblog in the local language (using Unicode character-set) on various interesting subject matters and showing different uses and various styles of writing could inspire people. If people can't get the idea of a weblog, next phases would prove very difficult.
A simple step-to-step instruction in the local language would be the most important phase. The guide must be prepared for primitive computer users who usually are not very comfortable working with computers.
Bloggers want their weblogs look distinctive. There should be some basic templates available in the local language, enabling bloggers to manipulate and modify colors, typography, etc with the use of properly created style sheets (CSS).
Keeping a complete list of all new bloggers and carefully maintaining it is very important.. If they know they have already dozens of readers everyday, they will write more frequently and enthusiastically.
The biggest motivation for every blogger is the number of her readers. There are several free services giving bloggers reports about the number of their daily readers. The main guide should address that.
More popular weblogs should constantly support fellow bloggers by linking to their interesting posts. Linking to other blogs make the community bigger and stronger.
Changing templates, working with HTML and CSS is not an easy task for average bloggers. There should be an online forum (such as Yahoo groups) in which people can discuss technical questions.
Only local celebrities can spread the word about weblogs beyond the geeky typical Internet users who usually make up the first wave of bloggers.
Technological advances such as new CMSs, new tools and services not only would make the community more colorful and diverse, but also more attractive and addictive to those already blogging.
As the number of bloggers rise, keeping manually maintained lists of them would become very difficult. A simple website to which bloggers can submit their blogs in proper categories will be very important.
Celebrities could get the attention of the press to blogging. The press could, in turn, bring more bloggers and more celebrities.
No one can better understand the special needs of a community other its own members. Encouraging local software developers to create tools and applications to answer the local needs can be very useful. Persianblog.com is a big example.
Note: A timeline for the Persian blogosphere will accompany the final article.
One thing that some Western journalists have not understood about Iran is that reformists as a political group may not be popular as they once were, but reform as an idea has never lost support even among the youth as the potentially most radical forces of change. (The small-scale student protests several years ago never led to a wide-spread student protest, let alone to a mass protest.)
The best evidence is that nobody talks about or demands a sudden change or revolution, even the most vulnerable parts of the society who have never experienced violent and sudden change.
Their parents made the revolution happen and despite some achievements (the biggest one is getting rid of Monarchy and establishing a semi-democratic power structure), they now know the real problem is not totally how the "Mullas" rule Iran, but how every single individual in the society practices basic rules of democracy, tolerance, and transparency.
It's a boring cliché now in Iran that everybody says the problems have cultural and social reasons, not political ones. But it can still say something about the significant change that has deeply happened in the society.
Is it just me getting only 5 Kbps download speed out of my supposedly Rogers High-Speed internet connection after 2,3 AM every night? Is there anyone with the same problem?
By the way, I live around Bay and College.
Here is a comment I recieved from a reader:
Hi derakhshan, as you probably already know the Cheney/Bush regime has started attacking Iran and would like to kill a hundred thousand civilians there like in Iraq, in order to better control oil in the region (remember 1953...).
One of the necessary propaganda methods for justifying the attack to US citizens was the process of dehumanization of "Iraqis".
IMHO, the iranian blogosphere and the internet experience of Iranians may be able to prevent dehumanization of "Iranians" and also help counter simplistic (and factually wrong or misleading) propaganda.
How? i can only speculate - it's really up to you Iranians to decide - people like me can only be supporters. So here are some speculations:
wikinews - http://en.wikinews.org is not yet used by as many people as wikipedia, but it is intended to be news (while wikipedia is meant to be for synthesis of old information, encyclopedia style). The whole style is likely to satisfy bloggers: a wiki is an html page which anyone with internet access can correct - the history of old changes is also available. But the difference is that you're supposed to stick to the facts and integrate different versions of the facts to get an NPOV. More free discussion is accepted on the discussion pages, in order to solve misunderstandings etc.
Anyway, the point is that the wikipedia and wikinews pages are a major node in the network of information distribution, and more and more people are taking them seriously, because of the fact that, in principle, they are not controlled by any single government or corporation, and certainly not by any individual (although there is a bit of a personality cult about the person who owns the computers on which the servers are hosted, who calls himself The Founder, but it's not as bad as in North Korea ;). If Iranian bloggers want to avoid having bombs dropped on Iran, then helping correct errors on missing context on wikipedia news articles and wikinews articles would be IMHO a good place to start. For example, unless there is pressure to remind people of the context that the USA/UK overthrew the elected Mossadegh government in 1953 in order to regain control of oil, then the racist ideas of Iran as a place "which has to be helped by bombing the hell out of it" will remain in place...
You might also want to consider starting an indymedia collective - but in that case the idea is to be really local and autonomous. See
NewImcHowTo on the indymedia twiki
for suggestions on how to start.
Amazing things are happening in Iranian blogs these days. Now I'm seeing what I was expecting in terms of my third metaphor, blogs as cafes, where a unique, interactive space for public political debate has been created.
First example is about the behind the scenes of the reformist candidate's campaign which is, for the first time, being somehow revealed in some blogs. Javad Rouh and Ali Seyedabadi have separately written about a session in which reforest journalists were invited to meet and talk with campaign officials. Its' fascinating to see how the journalists had openly criticized the campaign and the candidate himself and how the campaign managers reacted to them. (According to Rouh, Mostafa Tajzadeh has been more receptive than Ali Mazrooie, to the criticism.)
Second example is how about a dozen of independent weblogs, either journalist or regular people, have reported and discussed the situation of Azadi stadium after the extremely crowded and emotionally charged soccer game between Japan and Iran, which unfortunately, led to the death of a few people.
I can imagine how all of you, who can't read Persian, wish you could have.
Mostafa Moeen, the reformist candidate for the next president, has written his second post on his blog, which means he is taking it seriously.
Moeen's first post was about congratulating the new Persian year, and the second one is about a conversion he's had with some ordinary workers in Behesht-e Zahra (Tehran's greatest graveyard). The men were asking what he could do that Khatami hadn't and Moeen had sort of no answer to that, except that he had to run to protect the country from its enemies and people should take part to do the same.
He is the first presidential candidate who has a weblog and if elected, would be the first Iranian president with a weblog.
I'm really happy that our efforts and time we've spent to promote weblogs is paying off and now more and more Iranian politicians are turning to blogging. This is good for both them and us. It makes them more aware of what people want which in turn make them different rulers.
I only wish that Iran's Supreme leader, Khamanei, had a blog, or at least were reading weblogs. because, as I've usually said, he would rule differently.
I've made some changes here. To make the english summaries I write for my Persian posts more visible, I've intergrated them into the main column. But now I have no room for the latest photo from my photoblog. I'll figure that out later.
If you wonder how I've merged these two things, please take a look at hitormiss.org.
Just between you and me, I'm thinking of going back to Iran in late May, before the presidential elections.
I know. It could be risky and I could get into serious trouble with Mortazavi and others whom I know are very concerned about blogs and have asked all the arrested journalists about their relationship with me, would be happy to see me unprotected in their interrogation rooms.
But at the same time, this could be the safest time for anyone to visit Iran, since the regime usually behave much more reasonably, fearing of low turn out and bad Western publicity.
Having had a Canadian citizenship now, the only thing I have to do, other than widely spreading the word (not yet, please), is that I have to get some credentials from well-known papers or magazines so I could have their support if anything happened to me. Needless to say that I can also write for them if they'd ask me to. About things no Western reporter would possibly notice.
So what do you think? Any suggestions?
1384 years has passed from when prophet Mohammad started his mission and Iranians have never been less religious.
We always say that a good year will be judged by its spring, and by what I've seen so far, I believe we'll have a good year. Both Bush and Khamenei have appeared much more reasonable and easy-going and apparently are listening to people out of their offices.
Therefore, surprisingly, I'm very optimistic about the coming year. Let's wish all people, especially in the middle-east, a more democratic, yet peaceful year.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has apparently started a big media campaign by hiring dozens of journalists and donating a lot of money to newspapers, websites, and other media organizations in order to influence the public before he officially enters the upcoming presidential race.
First some Persian weblogs, written by Tehran-based journalists, published about the rumors. Later Gooya News published a letter in which the writer had public ally named some journalists who have been hired by a 'think-tank' who is said to be run by Mehdi, the middle son of Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Among the most popular rumors -- which is almost a fact now -- is that Shargh Newspaper which is run by Mohammad Atrianfar, a close ally of Rafsanjani during his eight-year term in the 90s, has the mission of convincing the educated, middle-class population in large cities, especially Tehran, that Rafsanjani is the best choice.
In fact, it has already started its campaign by providing an increasing space to news and views about Rafsanjani and the possibility of another term. The latest evidence is the thick special section -- traditionally published before the new Persian year, Norooz -- which has a picture of Rafsanjani's back, walking towards two golden chairs, on the cover, accompanied by a rather long interview with him, who is titled by Shargh the person of the year.
Among the websites, thought to be supporting him, are Aftab News, and the recently launched ISCA.
All this has developed in blogs and some other websites and if it wasn't for them, nobody would've probably known about them. This has not happened in previous elections in such scale. So here is another example of political effect of blogs in Iran.
I'll be speaking on two back-to-back panels tomorrow in SXSW.
Tthe first one is "Blogs and Blockades: Forging a True Global Internet" in which Benjamin Walker will talk about the reality of Chinese censorship of information, and I'll talk about how Iran is embracing internet and particularly blogs and what it means.
The second panel is titled "Blogging Without Borders: Bridging the Digital Content Divide" which I'll basically be filling for Joi Ito who is in Spain now for another conference and will have to try not to repeat myself.
By the way, I've launched the preview version of the website for my NGO, Rear Window Initiative. It's slogan is "Advancing peace and democracy in Iran through weblogs."
Thanks to a kind and generous friend and the great site59.com, I'm now in Austin, Texas. Now I have no idea where are the cool places here. Anybody wants to show me around?
In today's Iran, sporting a necktie with your suit says much more than the actuall words you could possibly say, especially if you are announcing you are planning to run for president.
Ebrahim Yazdi, the most prominent of the main nationalist party in today's Iranian political scene, Nehzat-e Azadi (Iran Freedom Movement), has officially announced his candidacy today.
His picture was on the cover of Shargh (PDF).
Ali Mazrooie, a top member of the main reformist party, Iran Participation Front (Jebhe-ye Mosharekat) is the newest well-known politician who has started to write a weblog.
Ironically, the main reason is his son, Hanif Mazrooei, who was among those arrested in connection with reformist websites, Emrooz and Rouydad. He later started his own blog after he was released, and now has even dragged his father to do the same.
Hanif has said that there are more reformist politicians coming to the Iranian blogosphere and I'm very excited about this. I guess by the time of elections in June, we'll see more high-profile politician from a wide-range of Iranian political spectrum turning to blogs.
I reluctantly have to make a few points about the recent developments regarding the Iranian journalists and internet activists: