In a country where many forms of communication and media are restricted by government, Iran has one of the most vibrant blogging communities in the world; hosting around 65,000 bloggers and 22 million internet users.

To suitably illustrate the popularity of blogging in Iran, according to Alexa.com, 4 of the top 10 sites in Iran are blogging services. The third most popular site in Iran behind Google at number 1 and Yahoo! at number 2 is BLOGFA – a free Persian blog service provider.
Surprisingly, not all the blogs are focused around politics. Topics include human rights, poetry, religion and pop culture. See visualization of the Iranian blogosphere produced by John Kelly and Bruce Etling for their paper, “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere.”

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