Similar to the worldwide blogosphere, or maybe even much deeper and more faster, the Persian blogosphere is adopting the new tools and is mastering the new technique, in order to increase the efficiency and to enhance the quality of the content in the Persian blogosphere. In a piece just published in Gozaar, I go through [...]
Similar to the worldwide blogosphere, or maybe even much deeper and more faster, the Persian blogosphere is adopting the new tools and is mastering the new technique, in order to increase the efficiency and to enhance the quality of the content in the Persian blogosphere. In a piece just published in Gozaar, I go through this process and give a brief introduction into the new face of the participatory media.
There was a time when “becoming a blogger” was as easy as logging into blogger.com and creating an account. This fortunate player in the era of participatory media would then write down his or her thoughts and publish the masterpiece. The next few hours and days would pass with our hero waiting for passer-byes to read, ponder, and post a reply upon the content. This was how blogging was defined in the early days - Read the rest of the article in Persian or in English.
Knowing Ahmadinejad’s love of photoshop, his calls for Israel to be wiped off the map may indeed be only a matter of playing around with Photoshop, than actually sending nuclear missiles down the path (the missiles might end up being painted paper as well).
So, this is how Ahmadinejad will annihilate the Jewish state, according to Gooya News.
Will you be surprised if I tell you that the picture they used for the front page of the state-run ultra-right newspaper Kayhan was in fact two years old?
Maybe all the worries about the new missile drill by the Islamic Republic are just overreaction. What would you think when you realize that neither Fars News, nor Mehr News or ISNA published any picture of the event. Add to that the fact that one of the pictures the state-run IRIB published actually looks too much like a picture taken at a drill which happened two years ago.
As I also briefly mentioned in the previous post (see: Kamangir is Back), I have started working on Project Profiler (see the development log here).
In short, Profiler attempts at discovering the map of the Persian blogosphere, through analyzing the connections between the Persian bloggers in different social networks, including Friendfeed.com, which I have been focused on for the last couple of months. This project will also use the reports now being regularly published by Project Didish.
As a short presentation, here, two preliminary graphs generated by Profiler will be posted. As of know, there are 717 entries in the database, each representing one Persian blogger. These bloggers have been discovered through friendfeed.com.
The first graph shows that from the 566 blogs registered in the database, 171 are on wordpress.com (30%), 122 are on blogspot.com (22%), and 58 are on blogfa.com (10%). Interestingly, about 186 blogs are on their own domains (33%) (also see the corresponding pie chart in the latest Didish report).
The second graph shows the ten services used by the most bloggers registered in the system. Red bars indicate filtered services, while green and magenta denote services which are accessible in Iran and those about which mixed reports have been given, respectively. The category “blog” is included in the mixed reports because many leading blogs are indeed filtered. More detailed analysis of this issue will be carried out in the coming phases of the project.
Profiler not only aims at producing a large detailed map of the Persian blogosphere, it will provide information about connections, usage statistics, and trends in this online society.
Effective tomorrow, anyone who wears stripped pyjamas will be executed for acting against public and private safety*.
p.s. From now on, this blog will be dedicated to apiary in alpine heights, the positive effects of cucumbers in getting rid of stomach gas, modern sewing methods, making flowers with flour, the importance of a diploma in migrating to Canada, and games for cellphones.
p.s.2. We might actually go to Siberia, because Tehran is getting too warm and the danger of execution is becoming too imminent.
p.s.3. Or in fact, maybe we just die….
p.s.5. Maybe, for the whole summer we just sit and not do anything, except for scratching our butt.
p.s.6. And if scratching our butt is violating the internal or external safety, we just stop doing it.
It really seems like in this country, that I am just hating more at any minute, we are the problem. The fact that we live here, our existence, that is becoming a problem. The situation is just becoming so bad that leaving the country is becoming the only solution. I really wish that these ignorant Iranians would just die out [for not standing up against the regime].
* Refers to a common reason mentioned by the regime for prosecuting people: “acting against the public safety”
The date on the last post in this blog used to read “June the 13th” for almost a month. This was quite a change for this blog, which used to be updated more than once on almost every day for over two years. Things had changed, but better, less tense, days are ahead.
First, there was my studies. I finally did my Candidacy Exam on yesterday (the first step toward becoming Dr. Kamangir). It was a success, well almost, and I will have a lot more free time before defending my thesis, which is completely irrelevant to the stuff I post here (see more about my thesis in here).
Second, following a lot of discussions, and deliberations of course, I had shifted a lot of the time I spend blogging to the Persian companion of this blog. The reason is that, put briefly, what will bring the regime to its knees is not the CNN or FoxNews bashing it. It is the Iranians who are the problem, and the solution at the same time. It was in the news a week ago that a brother strangled and then stabbed his sister because she asked for the permission to get married to a man the family did not like. This, unfortunately, did not happen on the surface of Mars. It happened right before our eyes. The problem is not Ahmadinejad. The problem is the Iranian youth who argue “Well, we have different values”. To deal with these “values”, the language is Persian, not English.
Third, I am spending a lot of time on my projects on the Persian blogosphere. Didish and Feedcounter are becoming benchmarks Persian bloggers use to compare each other against. With that, today is in fact the day I am launching project “Persian Blogger Profiler” or in short “Profiler”. The aim of this project is to collect all the information I have gathered from the Persian blogosphere into one relational database. The data collected through this project will be used for producing the larger graph of connections, friendships, and interactions in the Persian Blogosphere.
So, Kamangir is back and, as we say in Persian, I’ll be keeping the lights on (sort of implying that I will be posting more regularly).
This fantastic video has been created by members of the Middle East Youth. Do watch it, knowing the chance of it coming to existence by those shown in this video is almost as probable as you winning the lottery right now, without having bought a ticket.
The Kurd activist Farhad Hadj Mirzaei has been under arrest since last winter.
The Student Committee of Human Rights Reporters reports that the interrogators have applied harsh methods of torture, including electrical shocks and sleep deprivation, on the inmate, in order to take a forced confession out of him [Persian].
A week ago, his father wrote an open letter in which he mentioned that Farhad’s arrest took place when he left home for a dentist appointment. He claimed that his mother has undergone massive trauma after his arrest and that fracture in Farhad’s hands and legs has incurred as a result of the torture methods applied on him. Farhad has reportedly been the only source of financial support for his extended family [Persian].
There are unverified reports that Farhad may have been involved in a political kidnapping and ransom collection assault. While there is no evidence to suggest that this is in fact the case, the increased number of the inmates under torture and fear of execution has made the community unable to show the appropriate reaction.
Earlier today, nine women rights’ activists were arrested only to be released after a few hours [Persian].
Chris De Burgh, who happens to be one my most favorites, recently went to Tehran to do a joint song with the Iranian group Arian. In his website, the work is described as,
This is an exciting project as it is the first collaboration between Western and Iranian artists.
It also so happens that Arian was for a long time a favorite band for Azadeh and I. So, enough with all this, this is what they did together. Lovely, isn’t it?
My main argument in the talk was that the Persian blogosphere is now on the verge of adolescence and has well passed its infancy and childhood. To analyze this huge community, I argued, crude robot-based crawling methods do not yield meaningful results, due to the fact that splogs and seasonal blogs have cluttered the scene. To tackle the problem, then, I suggested using blogger-operated tools such as link sharing.
The anniversary of Operation Liberation of Khoramshahr is approaching. Independent of all the arguments against the war and how the Islamic Republic to many people’s understanding prolonged the war to establish itself and silence the opposition, the brevity and sincerity of those who fought and fell for their country should be honored. They fought an army armed to the teeth while they were not even wearing boots, and the blame for that is both on Saddam and those who backed him as well as on the regime of Tehran.
It is a lot fun to buy a condom in Iran! Of course, I agree with you that not only it is a hard thing to do, but also it could cause trouble for you. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s look at it differently. Imagine you entering the pharmacy and as if you are looking for some Acetaminophen, you go there and loud and clear, in front of everyone, you ask “Do you carry condoms?” The question of course will be different than, for example, asking for baby pads, because you’ll be asked for the type and size and make and flavor. And yet there is the chance that they sell you some stuff with pepper flavor and ultra smooth surface, something you’ll have to keep doing it for a day or two before the thing comes out.
Enough with the fantasy, they always put a guy in charge of selling condoms, because the assumption is that no lady will ever be cheap enough to buy condoms. And, obviously, ladies are not allowed to sell condoms to men they do not know, because they might think about the guy`s little thing for a moment! Such a disaster that would be! So, you go to the pharmacy and look for a guy. Let`s think that there is this guy mopping the floor and there is just one lady at the counter. Then, you`d smile at the lady and point to the man and announce that you`ll only talk in his presence. It is actually for your own benefit, because if you tell the lady that you are looking for a condom there is chance she`ll hide behind something and not come out till you are out the shop. Because, you are looking for condom, therefor you are going to have sex (shame on you!) and you are not wearing a ring, so not only you are contaminated with some disease but also you are a pervert.
…The guy who sells condoms will treat you differently, compared to when he is selling pampers, for example. When you ask for condoms, he`ll be at his worst mood. Why exactly that is, I have no idea! The guy has bought condoms and has put them on display, he has put up two huge posters, and then, when you go there to actually buy a condom, he treats you as if you are buying grass; he won`t look at you and won`t smile. He`ll give short answers to your questions and if you be a bit too friendly he`ll jump over to wherever the lady is hiding. At the end, if the cashier is a lady, the guy will put the condoms in a black bag, he`ll then take the cash and will hand it over to the lady behind the counter, as if that`s necessary for preventing microbes you are carrying, because you have supposedly had sex, to the lady. And the bag is exactly what they use when they sell ladies`pads, to stop people from knowing that the person is actually a real lady who does have periods. Similarly, no one should know that you can have an erection…
In her newest book, Seven Valleys of Love, Sheema Kalbasi looks at the works of Iranian female poets from Middle Ages Persia to present day Iran. Sheema is fluent in both Persian and English, to the extent that she does fine writing in both languages. When asked by the Persian Radio Farda why she focused on female poets, she replied, “as opposed to eight thousand male poets, only four hundred female poets are mentioned in our history. Thus, it is necessary to move on from Saadi, Khayam, Roumi, and Hafez and add material like this to the curriculum inside Iran and outside”.
Those Days
Those days
Poetry
Was my room
And wherever I felt unsafe
I gravitated into its eternal sanctuary.
These days
There aren’t any rooms
That can harbor me against the crowd
and behind every window
inside and outside every room
a two-faced clown sneers.
Although, recently I have been quiet about my blogging projects, including Didish and Feed Counter, I have been steadily working on the twins.
The aggregation module in Didish is now a local tool, as opposed to the previously-used web-based Gregarius which was strangling Kamangir’s host as the number of links grew bigger. The project’s interface is now extensively more elaborate, at last using a php-based dynamically-rendered presentation.
For those looking for more information, collected over the pace of longer periods of time, the latest trend report can be found here.
As a companion to Didish, Feed Counter collects information about the readership of feeds in the Persian blogosphere. Recently, input from Persian bloggers has helped extend the database of this project. The latest report can be found here.
This was the short version. For the longer version follow the links and if you didn’t find what you were looking for, please drop me a line.
On September 2005, Azadeh and I boarded a plane at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and traveled all around the globe before we landed in Winnipeg. It is fair to say that the land we started rebuilding our life on belongs to the people now politely referred to as the “aboriginals”. There is no need to look at the statistics; you only have to walk in the streets north of Winnipeg to see how off the society the original inhabitants of this land are. This observation will be complete when you talk to some “Canadians” and how much pissed off they are of “these people who reproduce to rip off more of our tax money”. Does that mean that I hate Canadians? Obviously not. Does that mean that I think the aboriginals are sub-human? Definitely not.
Imagine a Canada not surrounded by the Oceans, but by millions of Inuit ready to fight the European “occupiers”. Imagine an Indian leader having said “if each one us spits once, we are able to wash these bastards off our land”. Imagine cash and weapon coming from all around to fight off the “bastards”. Does that sound familiar? Yep, that would be called Israel and the leader will be the late Ayatollah Motahari of Iran.
The “occupiers” of Canada, including Azadeh and I, have been fortunate enough that none of the above has happened, that the first waves of immigrants were able to “push the indigenous people up north”, putting it very gracefully. Then, we came down the staircase and to the new city which embraced us and gave us new hope.
Does that mean that I think morality is not a factor in global affairs? I don’t know. Do I imply that we have the right to be where we are? Maybe. We are living here anyways. Do I mean that the same applies to Israel? Well, no European has had Canada being mentioned as the promised land and they are here. Israelis at least have the name mentioned in their “holy book”.
I wouldn’t want to be a Palestinian living in a refugee camp for sure, similarly not an Inuk living in a dusty reserve, if I could choose. Nevertheless, I don’t see what makes Israel anything more than a Canada established on the peak of a volcano.
A council employee in Japan has been punished after officials discovered he had logged more than 780,000 hits on porn websites at work in nine months (BBC).
BBC also adds that, “At his peak, the worker was looking at almost 10,000 pages a day” and Reuters reports that he has been “spending up to three hours a day”. Telegraph then goes as far as claiming that he “saw 780,000 porn websites in 9 months”. Finally USA Today realizes that these numbers do not match up.
I think what has happened here is the confusion of “page hit” and “browsing an actual page”. Right now, you have caused dozens of “page hits” on Kamangir’s server, one for every element on the page. That does not mean that you have watched thirty or forty pages on kamangir.net. Not that even this would make this man less of a porn freak.
Hamid Reza Moghadam-Far, the head of the state-run Fars News, when asked, “As the head of a major media outlet, do you already have a blog or plan to start one? “, stated [Persian],
I am not for what has become a trend for journalists to be active in the media and write their own blogs at the same time. The fact that a journalist (who already has the tools to communicate with the public) is going to spend a lot of time on his/her personal blog, more than leading to spreading information, is geared towards satisfying one’s need to be known by the public. We have banned this issue in Fars News … and a few cases have been prosecuted. [not exact translation]
If this is not the first time you are visiting this page, during the last couple of days, you have probably noticed that this page was down for about 48 hours. This is an answer to “what had happened” and “what will happen now”.
In short, Persian Kamangir just celeberated its first birthday and now I need to spend some time to go through what I have been able to accomplish and how I should rearrange things in order to be able to make a better schedule. Right now, my plan is to limit blogging in Persian to one post every few days, similar to what I have been doing here in the last few months. The time I can save this way I’ll invest on being with Azadeh and on my thesis, as well as on my work on the statistics of the Persian blogosphere and on a few other purely-technical projects I have wanted to work on for over a year now.
“Are you sure the Islamic Republic/Ahmadinejad have asked for Israel to be wiped off the map?” This is the question I have been asked by so many people over the course of the last few years. While I became more and more concerned why so many people kept asking the same question, I kept describing it, quite diligently, to whoever asked the question that “Israel is described as the tumor of the region by the former leader of the Islamic Republic and it is quite common to see slogans which ask for the destruction of Israel in military marches and such”.
Because the people who asked the question were more or less identifiable as belonging to the so-called “left”, I convinced myself that people are trying to negate the Bush administration’s perspective through saving the face of the Islamic Republic. When I was asked the same question for the last time by another friend a few days ago, however, I realized that the Iranian call for the “wiping off” of Israel might in fact be not about a “second Holocaust”.
A few days ago, I was asked the same question, this time by a friend who works for an institute some people accuse of leaning towards the “right”. When my friend Mark (name is fake) asked me the same question, I gave him the same answer, quite like playing a sound track I had stored somewhere in my brain. He refused to accept and sent me the link to the page on Wikipedia which talks about Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel. That was when I started doing a bit of research on the Persian sentence Ahmadinejad used in his speech at the “World without Zionism” conference on October 2005. Based on my knowledge of the Persian language, which I speak as my mother tongue, the translation given by Juan Cole, whose political viewpoints might be point of debate but his scholar weight in the field is irrefutable, and also given the translation published by MEMRI, which has no intention of apologizing for Ahmadinejad, I think the president of the Islamic Republic did not in fact ask for the “wiping-off” of the Jewish state. What he asked for, not that I find it legitimate, was the removal of the current regime in Israel.
Maybe this will make the issue more clear. My understanding of the average Iranian, and I am not referring to the super-ideological Armageddon-lover hardcore members of Basij, is that while they are mad at Israel because of its continuous portrayal as the “regime which has occupied Qods” in the national television, there is no strong anti-semitic sentiment in the Iranian public. I would compare that with what I have perceived in some of my Arab friends and how hateful some of them are when we talk about Israel. Without making any judgment about any person, I argue that in the Iranian case, even if Ahmadinejad does ask for the a second Holocaust, I do doubt that he would be able to gather an army who would fight for his “cause”.
I remember talking to a veteran of the Iraq war and he angrily remembered Iranian soldiers refusing to attend the fight when Iran started occupying land in Iraq. “The soldiers said they were not allowed to pray in occupied land”, he said. Although living under a hateful regime, the Iranian public is still very conscious when it comes to committing hate-inspired actions such as what Ahmadinejad is accused of having asked for.
The important question is, who should be blamed for the wipe-off misunderstanding. Is it the Western media which “took advantage of a vague remark”, as the following video seems to suggest? I think not. The number one person to blame is no one but Ahmadinejad, for being talkative and vague. He lacks the basic skills a politician, let alone a human being, has to possess, and that is spending more time thinking than giving speeches. He, whatever idiotic ideology he subscribes to, would have been told not to mention such a vague sentence, given he had asked for an advice before uttering his infamous “wipe-off” speech. The second place, in the list of people/entities to be blamed for in this misunderstanding, is IRIB (the state-run television), which started the use of the idiom in their English translation of the speech, without knowing what it exactly meant in English.
The fact is, as shown numerously on this blog and elsewhere, the English-language state-run media sources in Iran are hasty and irresponsible. They make such silly mistakes (see: Press TV’s Latest, and Funniest, Mistake) that I sometimes ask myself if, for example, the “prestigious” Press TV is taken seriously even by its own staff (see:Video of the Day: A very up-to-date PressTV Anchor).
The “wipe-off” sentence has been referred to in the media over and over and has become another “proof” that “Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler”. While I am not sure if he does not daydream about that, the Iran I used to live in was not a country he would be able to produce a genocidal army out of.
By the way, happy 60-th anniversary to all Israeli friends.
Three years ago, around these days, Masih Alinejad was banned from entering the Parliament [Persian]. At the time, Alinejad worked as the parliamentary correspondent for ILNA, a media source close to the reformists. When she published reports that indicated that contrary to their claims of “living an ordinary life”, the MPs do enjoy a high salary, she was accused of having stolen the regarding documents. Soon the allegations were denied, but she had already been banned from entering the Parliament [Persian]. Alinejad once again came to the spotlight when following Ahmadinejad’s request for “face-to-face discussion with Mr. Bush”, she asked for an uncensored interview with Ahmadinejad (see:Talk to Me Mr. Ahmadinejad, If You Dare To).
Picture from Ahmadinejad’s ongoing trip to Hamedan - Fars
Masih is once again on the spotlight, this time for a piece she wrote for Etemad Melli, a reformist newspaper [Persian]. In the piece, she refers to her recent experience in an aquarium, where dolphins danced to their instructor. She found a similarity between that event and the crowd which gathers around when Ahmadinejad goes to his numerous trips to under-developed areas.
These days, when even the administration confesses that the inflation is pushing hard on the people…the dance of the dolphins does remind us of the gathering of people around their president [Persian] [not literal translation]
Although Mr Ahmadinejad called his opponents “young goats”, and there was no official reaction to it, Alinejad’s dolphin analogy did cause huge outcry in the conservative camp. The shock was complete when Mehdi Karroubi, the head of the newspaper and a prominent figure in the reformist movement, denounced the article and apologized for it [Persian].
During and off-the-record discussion with an active member of the student wing of the reformist movement, she told me “I dislike Karroubi more than I do Ahmadinejad”. The likes of Masih Alinejad’s experience seem to confirm the rising idea that the so-called reformists might in fact be too conservative for the younger generation. What the implications of this change are, we need to wait and see.
Akram Mahdavi is another victim of unjust and unequal laws in a country where, for the most part, the legal system considers females only half human, and where women’s rights, as well as their cries for help are routinely and systematically ignored, trampled upon, and even ridiculed. The now 32 year old mother of a girl in her early teens is facing imminent execution for conspiracy to murder. According to court and other reliable sources, including Akram’s defense attorney, Mina Jafari, when Akram was 27 years old, she sought the assistance of a young male friend and conspired to murder her then 74 year old husband. Akram, who suffers from epilepsy among other ailments, had been forced to marry the substantially older man; her own father physically beat her into saying “I do” for a second time (read more)
To save Akram from imminent execution, the campaign needs to collect the equivalent of $60,000 as ransom. A Paypal account has been set up and bank drafts are accepted.
The campaign has also been given the red dress the Iranian soap opera actress Nazanin Boniadi, recently seen on Iron Man, wore on the red carpet at the Emmy Awards 2007. The item is for sale on eBay and all the proceeds will be used to pay off the ransom.
To donate on PayPal click on this button, for other methods of donation send me an email arash@kamangir.net. I will put you through to Akram’s lawyer and the organizers of the campaign.
The Kurd activist Farhad Hadj Mirzaei has been under arrest since last winter.
It was in the news that,
Hamid Reza Moghadam-Far, the head of the state-run Fars News, when asked, “As the head of a major media outlet, do you already have a blog or plan to start one? “, stated [
“Are you sure the Islamic Republic/Ahmadinejad have asked for Israel to be wiped off the map?” This is the question I have been asked by so many people over the course of the last few years. While I became more and more concerned why so many people kept asking the same question, I kept describing it, quite diligently, to whoever asked the question that “Israel is described as the tumor of the region by the former leader of the Islamic Republic and it is quite common to see slogans which ask for the destruction of Israel in military marches and such”.
Masih is once again on the spotlight, this time for a piece she wrote for Etemad Melli, a reformist newspaper [
