Blogging has become a favourite tool of political activists everywhere, and a particular challenge to regimes used to keeping public debate under tight control. Nowhere is this more the case than in Iran, where tens of thousands of blogs have popped up since 2001, when an Iranian exile in Canada devised a way of blogging in Farsi. There are now some 65,000 live blogs written in Farsi, as well as several hundred written by Iranians in English.
Iran’s rulers keep a firm grip on traditional media, monitoring the content of newspapers, radio and television broadcasts. Monitoring the blogs is harder, because there are so many…
