Why I built Azadi4Iran.info

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:56:06 -0400

As it became apparent that the Iranian Presidential election of 2009 was going to be controversial because many Iranian (young) people were incredulous at claims that President Ahmadinejad had won by a wide margin, I was intrigued that some Iranians were using Twitter to express their dissatisfaction. It was not lost on me that this was happening shortly after the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, an earlier event with striking similarities to the events in Iran, especially since it was predominantly young people who were instrumental in both movements. I recalled listening intently to radio broadcasts on an Amtrak trip to Washington to attend a conference in early June of 1989 in order to keep up with that event. I even participated in a demonstration at the Chinese Embassy while I was in Washington!

Since Twitter was about the only way to initially find out anything because the mainstream media largely ignored the story, I needed a way to follow the tweets coming from Iran. Since I had stopped using TweetDeck in favor of Seesmic Desktop, I created a column in Seesmic Desktop to follow the tweets of those who I had identified. Nevertheless, I knew that it wouldn’t be possible to follow these tweetstreams (among the more than two thousand tweeps who I follow) as easily on my iPod touch whose Twitter clients have NO functionality for creating groups nor on my Windows Mobile device where I would have to create (AND maintain) yet ANOTHER group in PockeTwit which had just added group functionality.

Then, I remembered that I had used Netvibes and FriendFeed to create an eventstream for the Indy 500 recently. So, I decided to do the same for the Iran election protest. I used FriendFeed to aggregate the Twitter feeds and I used Netvibes to present the information in a format that was suitable for viewing on any computer. Especially, in order to watch the eventstream on my handheld devices, I wanted to create a mobile version of it using WinkSite which I had successfully used earlier.

So that’s how (and why) it all started, but as I read the tweets, I discovered many more resources that I realized would help me (and others) to better understand a people group and their aspirations that I had ignored for much too long. So, about a week ago as the Netvibes page began to grow, I resolved to start this blog in order to chronicle the evolution of the page. Having been “caught up” in the vicious cycle of finding new content and adding that content as I began to use the page to keep up with fast-moving events, I neglected to do that so I am only now (about a week later) getting around to it. As a matter of fact, as I’ve worked on the page, I’ve realized that I no longer have as much time to use it myself because I have also been busy promoting the page so that others who want to know more could also benefit from it. Going forward, I will try to be more diligent in sharing my experiences as I expect that the page will continue to evolve in order to better tell a story that is becoming more and more poignant as events unfold. Stay tuned!

Building Social Media Aggregations

Why I built Azadi4Iran.info