Kamangir (Archer)

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 [...]

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 [...]

 Persian Blogosphere: On the Verge of Adolescence: Download

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

After I published the post “Why bombing Iran is a Must” in Persian, I received a lot of angry responses. The outrage was to the extent that I deleted the Persian post and apologized from the readers. The same day, later in the evening, a group of us gathered in our apartment to talk about [...]

 

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If you have not guessed how the case of a woman on the death row could have anything to do with “discount” a hosting company offers to its customers, well, that’s what I call the “Iranian Connection”.

Camels do not run on nukes. That, alone, is sufficient to prove that the Iranian theology is pursuing nuclear bombs.

This is the article I wrote for the joke version of The Manitoban, the University of Manitoba students’ newspaper.

The sign reads, “No service to people with loose veil, not even to our old customers”. This sign I wish was rare in Iran, but it isn’t. The fact is, there are stickers which carry the same message and are printed by the Police. These stickers are widely used all over Iran and their use [...]

Geert Wilders’s famous video finally found its way to the Internet. The much anticipated 15-minute video carries footage of Islamic leaders cursing the west and its values and advocating for Islam and its ways. The footage gives subtitles for the various languages spoken in it, the Persian parts of which are accurate. I wasn’t [...]

Given the number of posts I used to publish here, in the last couple of years, it just sounds too quiet in here now. I do know this and I do hope to have your support for the time when English Kamangir is going to become more active.
The fact is, I have to finish up [...]

The first report of project KiBeKi (Generation 1) is available. According to this report, the ten topmost websites in the Persian blogosphere are…

The matter of fact is that this blog has not been updated frequently in the past couple of months, at least compared to the rate of update which it saw last year around this time. This, however, does not mean that I have deserted this blog.
The Persian companion to this blog, at persian.kamangir.net, is almost [...]

On February 16th, I published a report on the statistics of the Persian blogosphere (see: Statistics of the 100 Hottest Persian Blogs/Websites). That report, as well as this one, are all results of project “Didish?”. In this report, not only we’ll take a look at the hottest Persian sources on the web, but also the [...]

This post is another, much more extensive, report about the results of project “Didish?”. In short, in “Didish?” I gather information about the most liked Persian blogs/websites. For more information please refer to the post “Statistics of the Persian Blogosphere, a Report“.
As a companion to the previous post, here, you can acquire detailed information about [...]

I talked to Ido Hartogsohn of the Israeli website Nana last month, about the Persian blogosphere and how its members manage to communicate with Israeli fellows despite all the tensions between the two countries. The piece was originally published in Hebrew, but Lisa Goldman has been kind enough to translate the whole piece in English. [...]

Through analyzing links shared by Persian bloggers, I regularly search for the hottest points in the Persian blogosphere (a brief introduction to the methodology is given in here, for more information please send me an email or leave a comment). This report is based on 171 sources and over 30,000 shared links. The Persian translation [...]

The International Fajr Film Festival has been a prominent part of the celebration of the Islamic Revolution since 26 years ago. Since then, every year, the cold February days see a lot of new movies competing against each other. The event also includes discussions about the participating films and a lot of other social events.

The disgraceful action of an Iranian student in Canada caused a lot of very passionate discussions in the Persian blogosphere. Reportedly, the 25-year-old Ph.D. student of Memorial University, Newfoundland, has pleaded guilty for charges of sexually assaulting a lady in an elevator. On his defense he argued, “You can’t expect all males to control themselves when the breasts are out”. He also claimed to have been abused during his three-week preliminary confinement.

You might know that since a few months ago I have been working on a robot which crawls through the Persian blogosphere (see: Statistics of 78,000 Persian Blogs - Report on KiBeKi’s results so far). A companion to this robot is another project I have been working on recently. I have given the name “Didish?” to this project (means “have you seen it?” in Persian).

Didish is a feed aggregator (installed at didish.kamangir.net), which archives the links Persian bloggers share through delicious, Google Reader, or other services. As of now, I have been able to find 163 sources. This chart shows which service the sharing is carried out through.

When I wrote an article for my Persian blog on how the Islamic Republic of Iran benefits from glorifying the Ayatollahs into holy figures, I had no idea that it would create such a backlash. The reactions, however, offer good insight into what Iran’s main problem is. It is neither Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nor the Ayatollahs who have “corrupted” Iran, as some people suggest. The core problem is the corrupted framework of thought with which the Ayatollahs have infested Iran.