Blogging In Persian

Wired 13.06: POSTS: "Derakhshan missed writing for an Iranian audience, so in 2001 he set out to create a weblog that could reach his old column's readers. He figured out a way to combine Unicode and Blogger.com's free tools to handle Persian characters. Suddenly, blogging in Persian was as simple as it is in English. His site - written in both Farsi and English - covers everything from Iranian campaign tactics to the synth stylings of French musician Jean Michel Jarre. At its height in February, his blog received 35,000 pageviews a day.
The Unicode breakthrough helped ignite massive growth in Internet readership in Iran. 'There were all these journalists who didn't have a venue, and all these readers who missed the reformist papers.' By last year, 5 million Iranians were using the Internet in the nation of 69 million, and an estimated 100,000 blogs.
The standard fare for Iranian blogs is similar to what you find in the US - dating, fashion, movies, and music, plus some politics and information age theorizing. But like Levi's in Khrushchev's Russia, such quotidian matters contain the seeds of revolution, Derakhshan says.
Maybe that's why the blog spring was crushed. At first, 'the clerics didn't really understand what they were,' he says, so they didn't bother shutting them down. But last June the Iranian judiciary put in place a more sophisticated filtering system that blocks Iranian access to political Web sites and blogs. (Derakhshan's traffic immediately dropped by half.) Then in September, officials got serious, arresting, interrogating, and even jailing some of the country's bloggers, according to human rights groups. Two of those writers, Mojtaba Saminejad and Mohammad Reza Nasab Abdolahi, remain in prison.
Still, as Europe and the US step up the pressure on Iran to dismantle its nuclea"