Seriously, not for the faint and not so faint of heart.

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Just an amazing photo.

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Somewhere in Iran, there are terabytes of data – unseen photos, unwatched videos and unread words that have captured events that have yet to be seen by those of us in the “West.”

The Ahmadinejad regime has struggled to tamp out communication among the Iranian people, now keeping it to a very slow drip. Hardly anything comes out from Iran these days, unlike the deluge that we have seen in the past. Keep in mind, Iran is the biggest blogging nation in the world outside of the United States. The culture there, with a majority of the population being young, is a wired culture. Hell, we are a wired planet, so why should Iran be any different?

Inside Iran blogs are down, tweets are non-existent, cell phone service is a joke and the web is a firewalled ghost town. But here comes the problem – the Ahmadinejad regime knows the people of Iran are pissed beyond belief and the people know what the government did to the people – those images of Neda are NOT going to go away anytime soon. The regime also knows that they are sitting on a powder keg of frustration and their only move is to keep the internet out of the hands of the people. It isn’t a question of blocking the West, the incriminating data is inside the country – on cell phones, cameras and camcorders and all sorts of digital recording devices. The data is stored in Iran and the regime cannot afford to allow it to leak to the West or even to the west side of Tehran. An Azure Curtain, an analogy to the Soviet’s Iron Curtain, has to fall across Iran and the regime has to hope that will be enough, but it won’t.

The Ahmadinejad regime is screwed long term (maybe even short term). They cannot hope to keep a smart, empowered population like Iran in the dark for long. Data will start flowing with the use of USB drives, CDs and home produced DVDs that will contain unseen images – all of which will spread like a virus. But knowing Iranians, this is probably already underway. Then someone will sneak a thumbdrive out of the country and more stuff will be dumped to the web.

Iran cannot hope to remain a modern country without the web. Hospitals, educators, manufacturers, banks, shopkeepers, everyone in that country benefits from the web and the only way the Ahmadinejad regime can keep control is to shut off the web and drive their population to the level of North Korea – a complete sequestration of Iranians from the world and each other – that is the regime’s only viable step.

The regime cannot stay in power when a huge swath of their population are bloggers and citizen journalists. Benjamin Franklin would be proud, Khamenei is probably horrified.

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IRAN: A Nation Of Bloggers from ayrakus on Vimeo.

Since the early days of Apple, before the “PC Revolution” and even before the web, I have had a snarky quote about computers and their relevance to the power of the people. “You will take my laptop when you pry it from my cold dead fingers!” Yes, it is a rip from the insensible NRA slogan about gun control.

With the advent of the web, browsers, blogs, Twitter, mobiles, digital cameras and all the rest, interpersonal communication has been the foundation of modern revolution. The most recent example is the Iranian elections. The above video was produced a year or so ago, but look today at what it has yielded.

This video was shot yesterday from the riotous streets of Iran.

The media has been a total failure on reporting these events. I guess since Jimmy Carter isn’t in office, there is no need to cover the action. Check out the stream on Twitter about the MSM’s failure on this issue.

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I attended the 140TC Twitter conference this week in Mountain View and @dexin from TwitterBrian.com wanted the Je.ly logo in pink, using the colors used in branding of the Snog yogurt shops in London.

Well, here it is!

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Perfect!

NOTE: Since CBS cheaped out and killed their video after a period of time, I substituted the old CBS video with the YouTube version. Why CBS is being so bone-headed about this I will never know. NBC still has skits from the election still up and the folks over at Comedy Central has ALL of the episodes of South Park, Daily Show and Colbert up and embeddable. CBS is just being clueless by limiting their content’s exposure.

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