Keeping Up with Iran

Apart from a brief, Friday night, 200 mile wild goose chase around the Midlands, looking for a train that would take me to Sheffield and onwards to East Yorkshire, that ultimately ended in tequila fueled sorrow in Leicester, I've spent most of the weekend glued to the unfolding events in Iran.

Just as big a story as the actual mass protests and revolutionary fervour on the streets of Tehran is the extent of the role that social media has played in informing not just the outside world, but those in Iran too.

I really do want to write something about this. But, to throw a complete cop out, every hour there's a new development and I simply don't have time to sit down and digest the torrent of information (and, likely, disinformation) that is pouring out of twitter, blogs and the mainstream media right now, so I'll send you in the direction of a couple of people who can do that. And ably so.

Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post has been liveblogging on the fallout of the elections, pulling together from Twitter and readers' emails the best of what can be 'confirmed' as well as snippets of analysis and opinon.

Andrew Sullivan's 'Daily Dish' blog has been doing a similar job but with more analysis and background information to boot.

On top of this, for images, the Boston Globe have done a couple of 'Big Picture' photo collections of some of the most amazing images from the past few days, here and here, whilst for video, YouTube user Ahriman46 has a very good collection.

Also, here's a few stories of particular interest, regarding the protests and the media:

Twitter backlash against CNN's lack of coverage.

BBC reveal their satellites have been jammed.

Citizen militarism in full effect as internet users outside Iran bring down government websites.

There's plenty to talk about here, but where to begin? In particular, I'm interested in the conflict between the MSM (mainstream media) and social media, as well as the moral debate surrounding the attack of Iranian government websites, not to mention of course, the incredible sights and sounds of the men AND WOMEN of Iran taking to the streets in protest and the surrounding politics, all of which are minefields. These I will certainly come back to in the next few days.