By Jessica Reed
When back in 2002 Hossein Derakhshan (also known as 'Hoder') started to blog and regularly update his webpage titled 'Editor: myself' in Farsi, some said he had started a revolution : by porting blogging tools from ASCII to Unicode he gave many Iranians the opportunity to blog in their own language. Here is an extensive list of Weblogs by Iranians written in English.
According to Wikipedia there were 700,000 Iranian pages in the blogosphere as for October 2005: the e-journaling trend is exceptionally popular amongst Iranian youth. It is said that blogs in Iran tend to be unregulated compared to other forms of expression - however many bloggers/journalists' written words are carefully monitored, sometimes even leading to arrests and lengthy interrogations.
Things might change now that President Ahmadinejad has a blog - a choice widely criticised and ridiculed by Iranian and non-Iranian bloggers alike- a majority of bloggers seem to deem the trendy PR decision as a populist move.
Elsewhere: Pensive Persian wrote "the average North American viewer knows next to nothing about Iran" + The Guardian's attempt at humour reads like that: "(...) he [President Ahmadinejad] surely ought to know he can get us on the internet these days".
