“How is Mr Abtahi's blog doing,” the Grand Ayatollah jokingly asks during a pause in a small gathering, while sitting on his special teaching chair which is higher than usual chairs.

According to a post on Abtahi's blog, the Ayatollah later tells him that he reads his blogs and asks him about its readership and the time he spends on it everyday. Like many, the Ayatollah is also angry about his website being filtered and provides the blogger cleric with a new unblocked web address for his website.

Any time you have party-animal teenagers and dissident old Ayatollahs doing the same thing, you must know it's a popular thing.

The latest example is Massih (Masoumeh) Alinejad, the parliament correspondent for reformist newspapers who was banned from the parliament building last week because of the troubles she had made for hardliner MPs.

It took 80 signs to oust her who had revealed financial interests the supposedly God-fearing and people-serving had secretly received as new year gifts and other occasions. Although they said she was banned for being “rude and intrusive”.

But now she has a weblog in which she continues to reveal more about the hypocrite MPs.

First example is about the behind the scenes of the reformist candidate's campaign which is, for the first time, being somehow revealed in some blogs. Javad Rouh and Ali Seyedabadi have separately written about a session in which reforest journalists were invited to meet and talk with campaign officials. Its' fascinating to see how the journalists had openly criticized the campaign and the candidate himself and how the campaign managers reacted to them. (According to Rouh, Mostafa Tajzadeh has been more receptive to the criticism than Ali Mazrooie.)

Second example is how about a dozen of independent weblogs, either journalist or regular people, have reported and discussed the situation of Azadi stadium after the extremely crowded and emotionally charged soccer game between Japan and Iran, which unfortunately, led to the death of a few people.

I can imagine how all of you, who can't read Persian, wish you could have.

(Cross-posted on Editor: Myself)