Page 3 of the national Sunday NYT featured an interesting article on research being conducted on the Iranian blogosphere by Harvard’s Berkman Center. Featured prominently in the piece is John Kelly, whose research I encountered when he showcased his analysis at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program. John also demonstrated some of his work here at UNC-Chapel Hill, and I hope he’ll come back and show his great work again. The Times reports:
Over all, a new study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School shows that Iran’s blogosphere mirrors the erratic, fickle and often startling qualities of life in the Islamic republic itself. The rules of what is permissible fluctuate with maddening imprecision, so people test the limits.
The full study is available from the Berkman Center’s website.
There was the important information, and then this gem, which was my favorite graph of the whole article:
–The study found that the next largest group of bloggers, hundreds of them, concentrated on romantic poetry. So many blogging bards might be uncommon in many other countries, but in Iran it is simply a reflection of a culture that so reveres poetry, where many children grow up dreaming of becoming great poets in the way many young Americans dream of a future in sports.