This problem of blocked weblogs isn’t something to be forgotten easily & I think if we don’t do something serious, censure on the Internet will be continued & even get worse.
As a great number of Farsi weblogs are on Persianblog & all of them at the time are blocked I think it’s very important for us to provide some true information about it to the world…
Actually Persianblog was made to ease writing for Iranians & has been providing free blogging service since about one year ago & now is the biggest Persian community in Internet.
There were just three computer experts who started it independently & were always committed both from government & people. As they had to follow the ruled & sometimes were told by government to ban some weblogs, some people believed that they work for government & they were also told from inside country that what they do is forbidden & it’s not right to let people publish whatever they want without censorship…but anyway, the number of users raised each day & more people started the experience of writing freely with no limitation for people of all the world…
Farsi is the Forth language in the Internet & more than 75% of Farsi content in the Internet refers to Persianblog, It also uses the biggest persian advertisement system in the Internet. The monthly transfer of Server is about 1.2 terra bytes & there are 5000000 visitors each month.
Here are also some accurate stats of the last information about Persianblog:
No. of registered Users: 89984
No. Male Users: 74449
No. Female Users: 15535
Reviewed weblog Users in Users List: 10137
No. Posts: 415979
No. Comments: 1286429
No. Posts with Comments: 220283
Comments per Post: 5.8399
These confirmed numbers (by Reza, one of Persianblog managers) that are just weblogs on Persianblog not other blogging services, show clearly the importance of weblogs between Iranians.
Actually In this short time, from the day that the first Persian weblog was created, writing & reading weblogs has become one of Iranian Internet users’ habits & of course a great part of Internet usages are for weblog, so blocking them at first won’t be very nice for Internet Service Providers. Another point is that a while ago, Parsonline that is the biggest ISP of Iran had started blocking Persianblog weblogs itself.
I hope this information can help the world to have a right view of weblogs in Iran & I really want other Iranians bloggers to do something not to let them do whatever they want with our cyber world…
Too bad Michael Ledeen is on vacation, this is a time when it would really help to have him kicking butt in his column and saying to the American government:
"These people matter. You need to establish mirror sites for these bloggers, so they can still be heard. We have the technology, this would be extremely cheap, and free speech is what we're all about."
Spammers can win the "whack-a-mole" game because they make money from their activities. Bloggers will need assistance from outside in order to play the same game with Iranian authorities.
do we have any more information on the precise type of blocking that is taking place?
it could help with figuring out solutions against it.