Lemmingworks

Catsy just IMed to say that a friend of ours, Hoder, has been arrested in Iran.
Report: Iranian blogger arrested – UPI.com

TEHRAN, Nov. 18 (UPI) — An Iranian blogger, who had visited Israel advocating improved relations, was arrested in Tehran and has admitted to spying, an Iranian Web site says.
Jahan News, a Web site with ties to Iran hard-liners in the country’ intelligence community, reported that blogger Hossein Derakhshan was arrested in Tehran and has admitted to carrying out espionage for Israel, The Jerusalem Post said Tuesday.

Derakhshan had visited Israel at least twice in recent years and had been interviewed by the Post, telling it he wanted to “humanize” Israel for his Iranian readers. Middle East political analyst Meir Javedanfar said Derakhshan had been based in Canada before returning to Iran three weeks ago.

“Prior to his return,” the Post quoted Javedanfar as writing on his Web site, Derakhshan had “started attacking (former Iranian President) Ayatollah (Hashemi) Rafsanjani in his blog. It is possible that he fell foul of a power struggle within Iran.”

The Post said Derakhshan, 33, is credited with having popularized the concept of the Weblog in Iran. He told the newspaper during a 2006 visit to Israel that he realized he might never be able to return to his homeland, but added, “It’s worth it.”

More information on google news. I’m not sure what to do, except to ask you to blog about it, a lot!

Catspaw, Friends/Colleagues Blogging, hoder, iran

Jeremy said that he is in the top 500 bloggers with over 5000 posts. I’m sure that beats me, but for the heck of it I looked for my old blogs and found them:
Index of /words/archives/old_content.butnot.the.right.format The first post when I moved from blogger.com to my own blog was May 25, 2001:Just Differently Intelligent…: Ok, I’m moving my existing, so perhaps that’s my earliest blog post that survives. I’ll keep looking though.

lj Blogging

I talked about this on the blog while back (see Anne’s Diary and Anne’s Diary Holds First Test Group
). It seemed problematic, and I couldn’t figure out what right they had to use the name Anne. I had some polite email with some folks there, but there wasn’t much to report. Of course the entire notion of how the technology works, finger printing children for the purposes of a commercial site is still an issue in my mind, but they have other problems now:
Website not a kindred spirit, says Anne authority

The P.E.I. government is investigating a new website for young girls that it says is using images of Anne of Green Gables without permission.

The web site features a certain redheaded girl in pigtails.
(Annesdiary.com)
Called annesdiary.com, the Toronto-based website says it is “inspired by the much-loved Anne Of Green Gables novels.” Aimed at girls aged six to 14, it claims to be the most secure website for children in the world. It requires a fingerprint reader and registration papers signed by a professional as recognized by the company running the site.

But it is not the company’s security protocol that caught the attention of the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority. Anne is a trademark owned by the government of Prince Edward Island, and Development Minister Richard Brown told CBC News on Thursday they take violations of that trademark seriously.

LM Montgomery, lj anne of green gables, Blogging

Alex has a great post, and not just because my course is starting this week by reading his chapter on Blogging. In Did blogging kill the public intellectual? Alex discusses Russell Jacoby’ item in Big Brains, Small Impact in the Chronicle of Higher Ed., noting “he assumes that a public intellectual inhabits the public sphere, and in this public sphere his professional life is nearly completely divided from his everyday life” while talking about how the noise of millions of bloggers has drowned the voices we should all be listening to, because they’re saying important things we should know.

I remember this debate, as I’ve said before, happening at the south by southwest in 2003, when journalists were going on about how blogs were cutting into their space. Of course blogs have ‘won’ though they didn’t actually know there was a battle, and are now entrenched in the broadcast media.

Alex’s analysis is better than mine, but there are two points I want to note, but I’ll stick with one. It is about shakespeare. As the wise and mighty Roger (my renaissance poetry prof. from the early 80s) was wont to impart, everyone wrote sonnets back then. Shakespeare (Sidney, Spenser, et al.) was just the best of them. People read sonnets was we used to watch hockey games. We played hockey, on the ice or in the street, and when we saw a professional game we could appreciate the skill because we too were players. The public poets were the best among many.

And that’s what I have to say about this supposed dichotomy between the public intellectual voice and the rest of us blogging… the public intellectual will serve that position best when everyone is speaking, and that intellectual just happens to do a better job of it than we do. Anyone can be a prophet in the desert. Do it in the crowd.

Everyone in CLD419 and CCLD419 should read this if they want to get a sense of the ongoing struggle for voice that blogs have initiated.

Alex Halavais, CLD419, Friends/Colleagues, lj Blogging, CLD419, shakespeare