Hossein Derakhshan
Hossein Derakhshan (حسين درخشان in Persian) (born January 7, 1975), also known as Hoder, is an Iranian [journalist]]-blogger, based in Toronto.
He started journalism by writing about the Internet on a popular reformist paper, Asr-e Azadegan.
Later, when the paper was closed down by the judiciary system, he moved to another paper, namely Hayat-e No, in which he kept writing more or less on the same topics. The weekly column, which was called Panjere-i Roo be Hayat (A Window to the Yard), with reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window), later expanded to a weekly page on technology and the Internet.
In December 2000, he moved to Toronto, Canada, where after one year, discovered the power of weblogs. On September 25, 2001, two weeks after the terrorist attacks to the US, he started his own in the Persian language, using Unicode. It was titled Sardabir: Khodam (Editor: Myself).
He later moved his manually maintained weblog to Blogger.com which was not supporting Unicode at the time. Moreover, he prepared a simple step-to-step guide in Persian ([1]) on how other Persian speakers can start their weblogs using Blogger.com and Unicode standard. The guide proved so successful that in one month, more than one hundred Persian weblogs emerged.
As of 2004, he is also a regular contributor to the BBC World Service, Persian section.