A revolution starts with one blog
: Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder, runs the Iranian weblog Editor:Myself where he not only has been reporting on the arrest of Iranian weblogger Sina Motallebi (and today he recalls witnessing the repression of free speech in Iran first-hand), but I now learn that he also practically single-handedly started the Iranian blogging revolution.
A fellow blogger named Khodadad wrote an article about Hoder and the start of Iranian weblogs:
It all started when an article appeared in a popular Iranian news site, written by a twenty something former Iranian journalist, a refugee of the shut-down reformist newspapers in Iran, who lived in Canada. He had discovered the format of blogging, and manipulated the latest common operating system to write blogs in Persian. In a few simple paragraphs, he explained what web-logs are, and how he had managed to created a template that allowed one to use the Unicode system to write Persian. He was perhaps hoping that a few Iranians would pick up the lead and make a presence in the world of web-logging. Well, he was right about
