People in the U.S. and elsewhere take blogging for granted, and don’t figure it’ll get them thrown in jail.
Not so in some countries such as Iran. And to show solidarity with two Iranian bloggers who have been locked up in jail, a committee set up to protect bloggers is asking blogs to declare Feb. 22 Free Mojtaba and Arash Day:
The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers’ is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on 22 February to the “Free Mojtaba and Arash Day”.
The group has a list of actions which it says bloggers can take, including writing to local Iranian embassies The Committee has deemed Tuesday “Free Mojtaba and Arash Day” as part of its first campaign.
It is calling on the blogsphere – the name for the worldwide community of bloggers – to do what it can to help raise awareness of the plight of Mojtaba and Arash as well as other “cyber-dissidents”.
“If you have a blog, the least you could do is put nothing on that blog except ‘Free Mojtaba and Arash Day’,” said Mr Hopkins. “That would mean you could see that phrase 7.1 million times. That alone will shine some light on the situation. If you don’t have one, find one dedicated to that – it takes about 30 seconds.”
Technorati, a blog search engine, tracks about six million blogs and says that more than 12,000 are added daily.
UPDATE: The bottom line is that Iran has become an extremely dangerous place to blog — a place where dozens of bloggers are arrested and tortured. As a BBC piece notes, the crackdown there is part of a larger crackdown on media in general:
When regular print outlets were censored, many Iranians turned to weblogging. In fact, weblogs have become a key form of communication in Iran. It is estimated that there are some 46,000 bloggers in the country.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.