The "Building Blogospheres" session at BlogNashville has just begun, led by Hossein Derakhshan (or Hoder if you're like that). He began by telling us a little bit of how he got involved in blogging after 9/11, and mentioned how his blog is filtered in some places, leading to a high subscriber by email number.

[1:42] Hoder says that unicode is the reason that Persian, and even Arabic, blogs have proliferated.

[1:48] "We couldn't find a way to show people which blog was recently updated," says Hoder, which led to the popularity of blogrolling.com as a tool. I think this is the case overall, in general, not just specially for bloggers in Iran or otherwise.

[1:53] PersianBlog.com made it really easy for many Persian speakers to get into blogging, because a user wouldn't have to know a shred of English to get into it. He says that Blogger.com is doing a good job right now with translating its service into multiple languages.

[1:55] While there have been a few mentions about "celebrity" bloggers linking to so-and-so's site as a way to build blogs or blogospheres, I'm not sure that it always needs to be the case. I think a lot of that thinking gets people to be stuck in a rut of contacting a Glenn Reynolds or Jeff Jarvis or Dan Gillmor and just waiting for the hyperlink to show up on their respective sites. Takes a bit of the fun out of organic growth, IMHO. I mean, don't get me wrong, but one huge link that's up on a main page for a day or two is great, but it's not what is going to get people to come again.

[2:01] Blogs are affecting society and culture as "windows, doorways, and cafes." More details here.

[2:08] Topics like nuclear power in Iran are comparable to the debates over Social Security, Terri Schiavo, and more.

[2:46] Rebecca MacKinnon wonders if getting Iranian bloggers to post more photographs to sites like Flickr, since images tend to add a high level of value for the reader.