The Ranking of Persian Weblogs

I originally wrote this entry on August 5, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I had heard that Persian language weblogs are a big hit but only learned how big when I looked up the top 100 weblogs on blogshares.

The number 2 spot was taken by PersianBlog ! (August 8, 2004)

Those who are veteran webloggers have probably known about blogshares for some time. For me, it was quite a new discovery.

The blogshares system was conceived and programmed by Seyed Razavi in Java and PHP. Side note : As a curiosity and in case you wondered about the similarity of names, my last name, "Mortazavi," is an inflection of "Reza," as is "Razavi". Both of us have the honorific "seyed" as part of our last name. (All of these quoted words are of course in Arabic.) What all this means is that we're very distant relatives with our commonality of ancestors diverging first from a few to several centuries ago.

Blogshares includes ranking of weblogs and a set of rules and strategies for exchanging "shares" of weblogs.

The Persian-language PersianBlog contains such diversity of opinion and topics that it is guaranteed to dazzle and satisfy all Persian-speakers (or more precisely, Persian-readers) who visit it. I found quality material on just about every topic I looked at. Not only the content but the quality and quantity of outgoing links are truly incredible. They open up truly new vistas for the Persian reader. One curiosity, perhaps for the non-Persian, will be the tradition of many Persian-language weblogs (as well as web sites) to include music as background for the textual material, often the music accentuates the reading of the text or category.

Blogshares even posts the ranking of some inconsequential weblogs. Its weblog stock market rules are rather egaliterian and no big IPOs are necessary ! ; - )