Hossein Derakhshan (حسين درخشان in Persian) (born January 7, 1975), also known as Hoder, is an Iranian journalist and weblogger, based in Toronto. His weblog is among the most-read weblogs in the Persian language.

He started journalism by writing about the Internet on a popular reformist newspaper, Asr-e Azadegan.

Later, when the paper was closed down by the judiciary system, he moved to another newspaper, namely Hayat-e No, in which he kept writing on the same topic. The column, which was called Panjere-i roo be hayaat (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 on September 25, 2001, he started his weblog 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] (http://i.hoder.com/archives/2001/11/011105_007529.shtml) on how other Persian writers can start their weblogs using Blogger.com and the 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 contributor to the Persian section of BBC World Service.

External links

• Hossein Derakhshan's weblog (http://i.hoder.com)

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