New study on the Iranian blogosphere

I have treated my Diwan as The Ugly Duckling for far too long. Having tried to revive it on numerous occasions.

So when the opportunity presents itself in the form of a very interesting and brand new study on the 60 000 or so blogs that constitutes one of the most dynamic and diverse blogospheres in the world, i simply can´t resist telling my patient audience about it.

The Iranian bloghosphere have intrigued me for quite some time now, even longer than my love story with blogging. It brings me great pleasure to present a 68 page long study from the same institution that gave us Global Voices, which to me is like my second home and family in a way. The study is the third in a series made by the Internet & Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harward Law School

The study is called, Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere and is written by John Kelly and Bruce Etling. It can be found here(PDF).

So Diwan of Democracy is officially back in business!

UPDATE: Mapping Iran´s Online Public is now available in Persian as well, it can be found here.

UPDATE II: In February of this year an updated map was released, and Yesterday that was supplemented with an Interactive blogosphere map.

The way the study was conducted has been subject to critique by Will Ward:

Like most people who saw John Kelly and Bruce Etling’s recent paper on mapping the Iranian blogosphere, my jaw dropped at the sheer coolness of the project and the types of connections it was making. But, given my experience with qualitative blog analysis, I was a bit skeptical of the project’s enduring value for social science researchers because it represented just a snapshot in time (i.e. the paper and data set was a one off affair that could not give an idea of trends and changes in the blogosphere) and also because in addition to mapping the connections between bloggers themselves, the researchers were mapping their own subjective descriptors and categories (labels like “secular/ expat” or Twelver Shi‘a) onto the blogosphere. There was no way for outside researchers to dispute the Kelly and Etling team’s labeling of a given blog, review or challenge the global labeling schema, nor to suggest new, potentially interesting or valuable alternative ones.

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere

On June 17th, The Internet and Democracy project at he Berkman Center for Internet and Society will present their long awaited study(at least by me)on the Arabic Blogosphere at the United States Institute for Peace in Washington D.C together with a discussion on Obama´s Cairo speech were bloggers from the Middle East will take part online. For those not in Washington, like myself, there will be a possibility to follow the event via a live webcast.