Balatarin - Balatarin Website Balatarin DES 2009
Please tell us when you started Balatarin and how you evaluate its success. Any statistics?
I launched Balatarin on August 16, 2006. So far there have been 300,000 news summaries posted on the site. 5 million votes and 1 million comments have also been entered. I, however, evaluate Balatarin’s success beyond its statistics: Balatarin is widely read by Iranian journalists and bloggers in and outside of Iran. As a result, the discussions taking place on Balatarin get coverage in multiple countries and platforms.
You used Digg as a model. Do you think an Iranian facebook will become popular too?
Yes. I think that having a Persian facebook that encompasses Iranian universities and high schools can be very attractive. Obviously, it depends on how well the site is designed.
How is the weight of bloggers in Balatarin?
Quite a bit. Most of the active users are bloggers. Balatarin is also the place for Persian bloggers to get wide coverage for what they write. Blog posts that are submitted to Balatarin often get more comments than the original posts on the blogs.
Balatarin was a leap forward for citizen media for Iranians. How you see the development of citizen media in the country?
Iran had a head start in citizen media by being one of the first countries where blogging became widely popular. However, it hasn’t been able to follow up with the pace. Any type of citizen media, even if it’s online, needs to be promoted by meet-ups and seminars as well as businesses which support its survival. This has not been the case in Iran.
Are you planning to launch an English version of Balatarin?
Not any time soon. At the moment, I am focusing on another project, Adoptic.com, which was inspired by my experience in Balatarin. The idea is to allow bloggers to promote their content by using their own and other fellow blog spaces. I am trying to create a very smooth way of content discovery and promotion. There are also a ton of cool algorithms being used in the process.
Balatarin was named editors’ pick in 1386 (March 2007 to March 2008) in 7 Sang, a Persian Internet magazine, and it was voted the second most popular Persian website in the same year.[1] Balatarin was also voted the best “News Website” in 1385 by readers of the same magazine.[2] Balatarin proved to be a very effective social network after the Iranian presidential elections in June 2009. Many Iranians used Balatarin for getting news about the green movement against claimed fraud in elections as the Government had started censoring all the news about the unprecedented protest movement of the Iranians.Balatarin was also used as a platform for coordinating the protest actions against the regime. The effectiveness of such actions were proved during the demonstration of Quds day on Sept.18th 2009. Tens of thousands[citation needed] of Iranians demonstrated in Tehran and other major cities against the regime[citation needed] although this day has been always known for protesting against Israel.
