Harvard: Hoder builds a blogosphere
: Hoder is telling the story of how he planted the seeds to grow the Iranian blogosphere. Many practical notes: Veteran bloggers need to link to new bloggers to give them encouragement and traffic; the bloggers love having hit counters to compete for traffic; the instructions Hoder wrote were extremely thorough (even telling people how to right-click to save a link)….
Hoder says that in repressive countries, it is important to have external hosting so they cannot be blocked.
He urges Google to hurry up localizing its tools into Middle Eastern languages (they are concentrating on European languages and Chinese for revenue reasons). This afternoon, Omar and Mohammed will be showing the new Arabic-language blogging tool they will be promoting.
He says that blogs are very cool in Iraq and when young people date one of the first questions is, Do you have a blog?
There’s talk about the social conditions that create fertile ground for blogging; they’re different in every land. A blogger who works with Indian and Pakistani bloggers find that the people she knows far prefer social spaces over individual spaces.
Hoder says a sense of individuality is important.
: Charles Nesson of Berkman has a great suggestion: He sees the need to spread the word about blogging and the substance and conversation of what it says and takes Hoder’s suggestions about using stars and he wants to find new ways for a center such as Berkman to help and help beyond the internet. So he suggests sponsoring a talk show about blogging and its topics with Hoder on the satellite TV beamed into Iran. Love it.
