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?

(Direct Link to Video)

I had a presentation today in the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 Conference, on a panel titled “Breaking the Silence: Iranians Find a Voice on the Internet“, about some of the results of the work I do on analyzing the Persian blogosphere (Project Didish).

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.

My slides are available at this address (PDF, 800KB). You can also go through the slides in this address, where slides are saved as individual snapshot images.

 Persian Blogosphere: On the Verge of Adolescence: Download

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.

[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XBQWgqE4X9o[/youtube]

(Direct link to video)

A satirical post by “35 degree“,

Do you carry condoms?

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…

source: Unknown

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.

Fereshteh Sari (more samples from the book )

Sheema writes,

I started the translation of these poems after losing my mother to breast cancer. I chose to work through my grieving period.

The book can be purchased online on Amazon. Some donations will proceed to a breast cancer research center in Connecticut.

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.

The latest weekly report shows that Radio Zamaneh is still on top, followed by BBC Persian, which is being closed on by the Persian blog 1Pzeshk.com. Then comes the Persian companion of this blog and in the fifth place by Nikahang Kowsar, the Iranian cartoonist. The complete list can be found here. For more graphs visit here.

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.

p.s. I’ll be joining Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 Conference next week, through video chat, on the panel for Breaking the Silence: Iranians Find a Voice on the Internet.

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.

[youtube]S9ty6CxvO7A[/youtube]

(direct link to video)

It was in the news that,

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.