Blogging Advocacy
In December of 2000, Derakhshan moved to Toronto, Canada. On September 25, 2001, he started his weblog in the Persian language, using Unicode. It was titled Sardabir: khodam, or "Editor: Myself".
He later moved his manually maintained weblog to Blogger.com, which was not supporting Unicode at the time. He also prepared a step-by-step guide in Persian on how other Persian writers can start their weblogs using Blogger.com and the Unicode standard.
Derakhshan spoke at the Wikimania 2005 conference in Frankfurt, Germany regarding the complementary use of wikis and blogs to aid political reform and the growth of democracy in Iran and other countries.
On leaving Iran, he was shortly detained and summoned to the Ministry of Intelligence. A few days later he was interrogated by an intelligence official over the content of his blog and was forced to sign an apology before being allowed to leave Iran. But after leaving Iran, he published a report on what happened on his website.
Read more about this topic: Hossein Derakhshan