Hello Jadi
We are three students from a university in Denmark and we are writing a project about Iranian bloggers. We've been looking at blogsbyiranians.com and found your blog interesting. We hope that you will help us in our research by answering the few questions listed below. You don't necessarily have to answer all the questions, but any information that you can give us will be greatly appreciated.
How many visitors do your blog have on average?
Why did you begin to blog?
What are you hoping to achieve with your blog?
Do you read/write/comment blogs both in Persian and English?
Do you see blogging having any effect on the Iranian society today, if so which?
How do you think the blog culture in Iran will develop in the future?
Best regards
Mikkel, Lasse and Kristian
How many visitors do your blog have on average?
These days it is around 550 people each day. In previous month (Jan 2007) I had 16834.
Why did you begin to blog?
I started blogging something around 5 years ago; but in Farsi (Pesian). Something around 2 years ago my famous farsi weblog (called http://jadi.net) was filtered so I decided to start an English weblog and started Inside Iran to write about my country. Before the censorship I was writing about everything, from gay rights, from nuclear pollutions and from religion. But after government censored that site, I started to write specially about the freedom of expression in my country and digital security in farsi (http://freekeyboard.net). I also started this weblog to tell the world what is happening in my country and at last I continued my divers blogging in my general weblog (http://jadi.wordpress.com).
What are you hoping to achieve with your blog?
I am writing for human rights and specially Freedom Of Expression in the Internet. For sure I will not reach to this goal by a weblog but I am sure that 1 is better than none and ten is better than 1. I am sure that writing about these issues make people more and more sensitive about it and if people will know enough about freedom of expression, the world will be a better place to live in.
In my country, we do not have access to the media. All the media is controlled by the government; so the weblog and the Internet is our only hope to communicate. We have to defend this right.
Do you read/write/comment blogs both in Persian and English?
| read | write | comment | |
| Farsi (Persian) | yes | yes | yes |
| English | yes | yes | no :) |
I do not comment that much in English weblog. I don't know why. Maybe I am not brave enough to write in English in others weblogs. I think I should start ;)
Do you see blogging having any effect on the Iranian society today, if so which?
Oh yes! In many circumstances the weblogs are the only source of the news. For example when police attacked the peaceful demonstration of the women in Tehran ( and ) the weblogs and specially the Kosoof.com's photos were the only source of the news.
Another example? There are weblogs dedicated to organizing and reporting on special movements / days (say students demonstration against President Ahmadinejad 16 azar 85 or Otobos1 which means TheBusOrganazation which is dedicated to the arrest of Mansour Osanlou, head of the executive committee of the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company ).
How do you think the blog culture in Iran will develop in the future?
I am a researcher on this field. My job is researching on weblogs and educating people and organizations about it. The Weblogestan (farsi blogsphere) is professionalizing. After the first rush to writing weblogs, now the curve is slowing down but we see more and more professionals who write weblogs. At the begining years, the bloggers mostly were the younger generation who wanted to TALK and shout that "I AM HERE! I AM ALIVE" but in the recent years we see more and more journalists who use blogs as a media for their "unpublishable articles in the newspapers". We see more and more professors who use their blogs to write about their real beliefs and we see more and more minority who use weblog as a tool to show that they exist.
