Iranian bloggers: a new nation on the web

Watching this amazing piece (Iran: A nation of bloggers) developed by Aaron Chiesa, Toru Kageyama, Hendy Sukarya and Lisa Temes, students from the Vancouver Film School, give others who don't know much about Iran a little bit of information and that's really appreciated.

In video says:

"Iran is a third largest of country of blogger with over 700,000 blogs in 2005 and 100,000 actively maintained."

which is correct but I should clarify something here that not all 700,000 are against Islamic regime of Iran. Some of bloggers are apologist of Islamic regime of Iran and some others are as fanatic as Islamic regime and sometimes worst. But I can say largely Iranian bloggers are secular and not so much religious (compare to very much religious people).

Thanks to John Kelly and Bruce Etling from Harvard University, they mapped Iran's Blogosphere in two spectrum Politics and Culture and their finding shows:

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Iranian bloggers are mainly young democrats critical of the regime, we found a wide range of opinions representing religious conservative points of view as well as secular and reform-minded ones, and topics ranging from politics and human rights to poetry, religion, and pop culture. Our research indicates that the Persian blogosphere is indeed a large discussion space of approximately 60,000 routinely updated blogs featuring a rich and varied mix of bloggers. Social network analysis reveals the Iranian blogosphere to be dominated by four major network formations, or poles, with identifiable sub-clusters of bloggers within those poles. We label the poles as 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks. Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere

Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a branch of Iranian military recently announced:

IRGC’s official press organ, Sobh Sadegh, writes that it considered the Internet and other digital devices including SMS as a threat to be controlled. It announced that the 10,000 blogs will promote revolutionary ideas. IRGC considers the Internet as an instrument for a “velvet revolution” and warned that foreign countries have invested in this tool to topple the Islamic Regime. Internet and Democracy

After censoring blogs, imprisoning bloggers, even execution of bloggers and drafting a new bill considering death penalty for bloggers who write against regime, religious figures and Islam; now they publicly are coming to fight us on the online scene, how good it will be?! Well, put these besides their whole group of experienced fanatic religious and conservative bloggers that have been defending Islamic republic on the blogosphere, it proves that Islamic totalitarian regime is frustrated and uses all means to stop bloggers.

Islamic Iran has been the enemy of internet but they couldn't beat us by blocking our blogs and sites, people would find new ways to go around and visit their favorite blogs but Islamic regime fears more specially with new generation of bloggers who are against religion and anything religious. I see a new trend is emerging among Iranian bloggers, agnostics, atheists, humanists and all are coming out and expressing themselves and their ideals although they can’t use their real identity but it scares the hell out of ayatollahs in Iran.