Believe it or not, the over-hyped Technorati, still doesn't support unicode queries, despite its claims to be the single best source on the state of blogging in the world.
Six month ago I wrote in this blog:
Just go and search for these three widely used words in Persian,
Arabic and Hebrew. You'll get ZERO results:
امروز
عراق
הארץHow can Mr. Sifry's Technorati be "the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs," when they can't even show a single result for queries in at least these three languages whose blogospheres could easily be as big as one million blogs in total?
David Sifry then replied:
Actually, it is because our parsing of farsi, Arabic, and Hebrew aren't very good right now. We're actually working on building out our search support for more languages, and these 3 are important. But it'll still be a while until things are much improved. Sorry...
Six months on, there has been no improvement. So I wonder how Technorati allows itself to say anything about blogs that use Unicode scripts.
The closure of Shargh newspaper could be explained best this way:
Shargh was not only the voice of the moderate reformists, but also targeting a very influential part of the reformist constituency with higher income and higher education.
So now that the Assembly of Experts' election is under way, which is basically the body that is supposed to appoint the Supreme Leader and to watch his performance.
The radical conservatives, Ahmadinejadies, have tried to stop moderate clerics from running with different techniques such as exams on their religious expertise (because they have to be Mojtaheds, or senior cleric who are allowed to issue fatwas.)
But they've also tried to cut off the reformists channels to reach their constituencies in the past few years and that has really limited their contact with the educated, urban populace.
Shargh at best had some 200,000 readers per day, but it had a significant inluence, not only in terms of its informative functions, but also in the narrow space it had created for important debates on various topics.
I'm back to Berlin, one of my favorite cities in Europe. The reason this time, actually, is the Deutsche Welle blog awards, The Bobs, which is getting better every year. I'm on their ten-member jury, representing the Persian blogs.
We finished a very exciting and to be honest intense session today with other jury members and people from the Deutsche Welle Online, deciding about the final winners in the several categories the awards has considered.
I'm not going to give anything away, since there is going to be a public ceremony in which the winners will be officially announced.
So if you are around in Berlin tomorrow (actually today now, Friday!) come to the Museum for Communication Berlin at Leibzig str.16 at 8:00PM to watch the event. It's a free event, i believe.
What Rooz is doing to me in refusing to pay my rights and bringing someone else to continue the job, is similar to what Ahmadinejad's government did to the bus drivers on strike. It never acknowledged the drivers' rights, but replaced soldiers with the original drivers and accused the drivers of having political intentions behind their strike as a result of their overdue salaries.
Now it's quite disappointing that Rooz's publisher, Mr. Hossein Bastani, who himself has been an official employee of the Presidency office until a few years ago, preparing confidential news bulletins for them, is doing the same thing as the Islamic Republic.
He doesn't acknowledge my rights and in his personal emails to me call it "hostage taking" and "blackmailing," refuses to pay me my overdue salary for over a year of maintaining Rooz's website and all technical aspects of it, and even accuses me of having other intentions behind the demand for my rights. (In a new editorial, he compares my strike to the government's attempts to crack down on free speech.)
I have consulted and done web projects for a lot of clients with whom I have huge differences of opinios. From Radio Farda and Ettehad-e Jomhouri Khahan to governmental organizations in Iran (when I was still living in Iran) and religious institutes.
Rooz has the closest political viewpoints among the Persian media to my own point of view and the disturbing implications by Mr. Bastani that my intentions are similar to those who have shut down the reformist papers is very unfair.
I have voluntarily broken my strike since yesterday until the upcoming elections in Iran as to show that the problem is nothing political or self-serving, but a legitimate strike to obtain my rights.
As soon as Rooz and Iran Gooya, which is the French-registered entity that has received funding from Hivos, pays my overdue payments, I'm more than happy to continue working for a website I've put so much love, energy and time on.
I expect Hivos, the dutch foundation behind Rooz, to press publishers of Rooz to also show respect for other people's rights in action as well as in the words they write.