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Wondering what it's like in Weblogestan? Iranian blogger Arash Kamangir highlights the real tricks and turmoil that make up the Persian blogosphere.

We are happy to share the with you the news that The March 18 Movement (OR318), won a 2009 ThinkSocial Award for “demonstrating truly innovative and courageous leadership in the use of social media for public purposes.”

Aside from videos, blogging and twittering were other tools used by Iranians inside Iran to get their views out about what was going on during the elections. The Canadian-based Iranian blogger Arash Kamangir questioned whether blogging is only a positive vehicle for change.

My last blog seems to have attracted an incredible amount of attention, and, as often happens, I have been given more credit than is absolutely necessary. I printed an email from an Iranian I consider a very good source, to the effect that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been taken to the hospital, and was in a coma. I pointed out that it was easy to be wrong on such stories, and that in fact I had wrongly believed that Khamenei had died a couple of years ago. But I thought the source was good and I passed on his/her information.

Despite enormous objections around the world, "Behnoud Shojaee was executed early this morning in Tehran’s Evin prison.

The following is a guest essay by my friend Simon Ardizzone, who has collaborated as an editor with Maziar Bahari over the past two years, making five films with him. Simon is the director/producer of Hacking Democracy.

We biked about 40 km from University Admin building to Assiniboine park, then to Forks and back to University to show our support for the global solidarity day with Iranians around the world. The poem, or better say the attempted poetry, below tells the story!

Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.

International media coverage of the Iranian protest movement in the past weeks has widely celebrated ‘Twitter power' as a tool of organizing and reporting on protests, but the reliance on Twitter has had both positive and negative results in this crisis. We look at some of them here to demystify the actual degree of impact.