hoder

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Member for

5 years 19 weeks

Biographical Information

Location

Europe - UK

Bio

Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan hoder.com
is an Iranian-born blogger, journalist, and internet activist. Since
mid-90s, he has been advocating the use of internet, particularly as a
means for social and political reform in Iran.

His award-winning weblog, Editor: Myself,
which was started in Sep 2001, has been among the most influential
blogs in Persian language and his step-by-step instruction to create
blogs in Persian should take much of the credit for inspiring thousands
of Iranians to start their own blogs. He also writes for a Washington Post and Newsweek blog, titled PostGlobal.

Hossein, whom The Guardian
called a "key link from Iran's teeming world of Weblogs to the west",
has been living in Toronto since Dec 2000, but now spends most of his
time traveling. When not worrying about wireless internet access, he
updates his blogs in Persian and in English, a blog watching internet censorship in Iran, and a photoblog.

After his unprecedented public trip to Israel in January 2006 and
his multimedia coverage of the Iranians living there as a citizen
journalist, he has recently launched a project called TehrAviv, with
help from an Israeli friend, to promote peace and understanding between
the two nations of Iran and Israel and disarm the radical establishment
in both countries.

He also last visited Iran last June to cover the presidential
elections for his readers. There he was shortly detained and
interrogated by the Ministry of Intelligence before being forced to
write an apology to be able to leave Iran a week after he had planned
to.

He has spoken at various conferences and academic events including
Harvard Law School, The Middle East Institute of Columbia University,
Iranian Studies Center at the Tel Aviv University, and Journalism
School at the University of Stockholm.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times,
International Herald Tribune, Die Zeit, BBC News, Open Democracy, etc.

Links

Website

//hoder.com/

Link to my previous index page on iranian.com (pre-Aug 2007)

//iranian.com/derakhshan.html