Dispatch from Kampala STOP Was lucky to visit Question Box Call Center Today STOP Our visit mentioned on the QBox Blog STOP No Sign of Idi Amin STOP Please send MTN airtime STOP

538 uses past Iranian election statistics to explore claims of Ahmadinejad's strength in rural areas. For example, in the holy city of Qom, in 2005, Ahmadinejad won 55.2% of the vote.

Professor Eric Hooglund, who studies people in rural Iran, thinks that the simplistic portrayal of Ahmadinejad's rural base of support in Western media contradicts his own research and experience. An interesting read.

BBC says there's a new protest today, and a very large one planned for tommorrow.

You've seen this everywhere by now, but 6 members of the Iranian National Football Team, including the captain, wore green armbands in support of opposition protestors. However, they failed at qualifying for the World Cup.

As an Iranian-American, I am absolutely proud of the numbers of people in Iran that have taken to the streets to demand that the results of the recent Presidential elections be verified.

I have developed an addiction to the Twitter feeds that have focused on breaking news inside the country. Specifically, I have been checking out the tweets of @persiankiwi, and following updates of #IranElection, which seems to get a new tweet every second or so.

Here are some interesting things that happened today during this worldwide use of Twitter to share information about the Iranian reaction to the election results:

Twitter had originally scheduled a maintenance window of 90 minutes of downtime for around 9:30pm Pacific time (which would have meant that Twitter would be down early this morning in Iran). Amazingly, after thousands of users (including myself) sent tweets to Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and @twitter, the hosting company that Twitter works with, NTT America, actually rescheduled its maintenance to coincide with 1am in Iran.

For quite a while, people were re-tweeting a message that the Twitter tag #IranElection was being "blocked" inside of Iran, and that users should migrate to one of several other hashtag feeds. Well, this seems to be false, of course. I don't know where this original message came from, some on the feed seemed to think that supporters of Ahmadinejad had hopped onto Twitter in an attempt to disperse the feed into smaller subgroups. In any case,  after a few hours, messages such as "#Iranelection blocked in Iran rumor was debunked hours ago. Don't spread misinformation. use #Iranelection" had begun to appear, and now #IranElection is still at the top of the "Trending Topics" list.

I was also quite impressed with the amount of people have set up proxies to help users inside Iran get around potential Internet access blockades by the government. As the government of Iran should be able to block access to proxy servers based on publicly posted IP addresses, many Twitter users were attempting to distribute proxy info via direct message, by posting tweets such as "setting up a new proxy IP for people of Iran. I need some1 in contact with them 2 add me so I can DM the address to them."

Here are a few links that might be useful for people looking for more information about the actions taking place in Iran right now:

• How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens
• Iran-news.info seems to be aggregating International News reports about Iran
• This is an interesting site that talks about what some protestors in Iran may be seeking.

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post on ProgrammableWeb.com about the Y2K-bug-like "Twitpocalypse." This programming issue basically concerns the maximum amount of numbers the default MySQL integer field type can hold. This limit is 2,147,483,648 - and the idea is, if the maximum amount of tweets in the Twitter system exceeds this value, Twitter chaos would ensue. Well, honestly, I thought that the Twitpocalypse was all hype, because I couldn't believe that many programmers would make the mistake of using the default integer type to store tweet id values. Well guess what? The iPhone twitter client I use, Twitterific, has been bombing all weekend. Why? It has succumbed to the Twitpocalypse!

Ashley, Laura and I had a great deal of fun at Maker Faire, showing the kids our refurbished demo of Art/Mo/Sphere. Here are some pics. Next stop for me... East Africa.

For several months, my hardly-ever-used iSchool Blog has been the very first result of a Google search for "ischool blog." This has baffled me since I first noticed it while I was searching for the enigmatic UC Berkeley School of Information Blog. I rarely post anything to my iSchool blog, except for the occasional school essay, so it's not like the content is being updated in a timely manner. What is even more interesting in terms of an extremely high Google page rank having the top listing (thanks Nick!) is that nothing links back to my blog except my own pages. The Pagerank algorithm is influenced by popular sites linking to others... and yet, my blog has no incoming links.

I thought that perhaps my site's ranking was being influenced by the blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu domain as a whole... but, well, nobody is linking to blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu. Why would they? So, is it possible that simple links back to myself are inflating my pagerank?

In any case, I just recently changed the title of my iSchool Blog to "Michael Manoochehri's I School Blog," because my last name is way more fun than my first name. Will this have any effect on the result rankings? We shall see!

Art/Mo/Sphere is on the Maker Faire website!

RocketBoom (does anyone watch RocketBoom? I feel like their target audience probably knows the subject matter better than the show producers) recently produced a video piece on "single serving sites." Instead of watching the entire 4:44 minute video, watch until it mentions the incredible paper (and single serving site) written by the UCB I School's Ryan Greenberg, and then hop over to the actual paper, which is orders of magnitude more interesting than RocketBoom's "What's our target audience? Ourselves?" snoozefest.

Check out my latest blog post about an Arduino/NewsWire/Smoke Alarm mashup, featured on ProgrammableWeb.com:

Are you a developer who wants to get your news immediately? The New York Times NewsWire API, which provides links and metadata for Times articles the moment they are published, might solve your problem. But what if your news alert mashup doesn’t quite get every bit of your undivided attention? Jer Thorp’s NewsAlarm (our Mashup of the Day), combines the NewsWire API and an 85 decibel smoke detector into what might be the loudest mashup on the planet.

Read the rest of the article here.