High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Following a crackdown on Iranian media beginning in 2000 many Iranians turned to weblogging (blogging) to provide and find political news. The first Persian language blog is thought to have been created by Hossein Derakhshan, (in Canada), in 2001. Derakhshan also provided readers with a simple instruction manual in Persian on how to start a blog. In 2004, a census of blog around the work by NITLE found 64,000 Persian language blogs. In that year the Islamic government also began to arrest and charge bloggers as political dissidents and by 2005 dozens of bloggers had been arrested.