Abtahi, then Vice President for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, starts Webnevesht, the first blog by a member of the Iranian cabinet. 2004 16 January - Protesting MPs on sit-in start a weblog. 6 June - Persian Blogging festival starts. November - Iranian blogger Mojtaba Saminejad arrested for writing about the arrests of three other bloggers. 2005 5 January - Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's Chief prosecutor, ordered major ISPs to filter PersianBlog and other blogging service websites. 27 January/12 February - Iranian blogger Mojtaba Saminejad briefly released, then rearrested October Blog Herald estimate: 700,000 Iranian blogs, of which about 10% are active 11 October - Blogging courses starts in the holy city of Qom, the traditional home of Iran's religious establishment. They are run by the newly established office of religious weblog expansion. 2006 Persian language was listed by Technorati among 10 most common languages among bloggers. 14 August - President Ahmadinejad starts his multilingual blog with one long entry. 13 September - Mojtaba Saminejad is released from prison, after serving term. December: Mehrnoush Najafi Ragheb won city council election in Hamedan. 4 December: Masoumeh Ebtekar, the first female vice president of Iran starts her blog in Persian. 2007 24 December: Almost a year after starting her blog in Persian, Massoumeh Ebtekar starts her blog in English, under the title "Persian Paradox". 2008 28 January - Parsweblog.com, the first free blog service based on wordpress in Persian, is launched by Mohammad hasan abbasi 1 November: Hossein Derakhshan, credited with starting the blogging revolution in Iran and frequently called "the father of Persian blogs" was arrested at his family home in Tehran, not long after arriving there. He was allowed four calls to his family, each lasting about one minute, during November. Amnesty International suggested that he was likely to face charges of "insulting religion", but he had not yet been charged as of mid-December. November: Revolutionary Guards announced their plan to launch 10000 blogs. 30 December: Alireza Jamshidi, the speaker of the Judicial system of Iran confirmed Derakhshan's arrest, said that Derakhshan was in the custody of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, that his case was in early discovery phase, and that among the accusations were that Derakhshan had allegedly written about the "Pure Imams". 2009 1 January: Iranian's own video sharing site "IranianYouTube.com" was created late April: Hossein Derakhshan remained under detention and had not been charged. June: Vahid Online broadcast live