Mike Wallace Listen Up--The President of Iran Enjoys Rights Denied to Others

How very nice that the President of Iran got himself a blog--there's sure to be several news stories on that. Hope he doesn't find his blog blocked, as many bloggers in that part of the world have. You can read about Internet Censorship in Iran here. Interested in the issue of Internet Censorship? Click here. Interested in Iran? The Blog Iran website has some information about people who blog for Iran. I can't say I really understood, but they have a very nice picture, suitable for any story on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or perhaps Mike Wallace.

Update 1: The entire page has been completely redesigned since last night and their server is no longer struggling, but I can't access any flags to show English! A friend is not seeing what I am seeing, and I'm looking into that. 11:09am

Update 2: Looks like Iran has mastered inbound blocking by ISP. Having studied Internet Censorhip for a number of months, I decided to try out what people do in that part of the world to circumvent the pervasive internet censorship in that region. The President's website has magically reappeared via technology. If you don't see a picture of the President of Iran when you click the reference to the blog in the first paragraph, click here. That is, unless that IP is blocked by the time you get there.

Clever way to block a website, seemlessly serving you a website in light blue, dark blue and orange--all in Persian instead of the President's blog . If you don't see a website in green, white and red with a picture of the Presiedent of iran on it, you haven't seen the President of Iran's website. It's still there, carefully hidden from my view. Hey, I'm living like the other half of the world now. No wonder it makes them a little crazed, having reproduced the result in front of my very own eyes. 12:31 pm. I'm updating the posting time now; original time of post was 2:20 pm August 13, 2006.

Update 3: Time for me to go get a life off the Internet.

I now understand why people who have their blogs blocked largely give up the discussion and the fight after the initial reaction. I can see the President's blog again at the url in the first paragraph. Is it a change in my leased ISP? Inbound blocking policy change? Did I get there via some server move to handle increased traffic? Results as listed above could lead one to think that, just perhaps, one temporarily lost one's sanity or one's eyesight.

I do know this: at the same time I could only access a completely different website in Persian, at least 2 other people accessed the President of Iran's blog using the same url. I didn't do a number of tests routinely run by people checking internet censorship, which might have revealed the truth. Whatever the case may be, blocking blogs is bad--I do believe that people smart enough to access the Internet are smart enough to make up their own minds on what they want to look at, that's for sure. 2:51 pm

Update 4: It's August 25. Ten days and the president-blogger hasn't gotten past his first post. In fact, the very same reader comment about wanting bigger fonts is still there, just like a week ago. Doesn't this guy even have a ghost writer?

Update 5: September 1, 2006 and the President of Iran still has not updated his blog.