Goftam.com

Pars Arts contributor Javod Khalaj’s new site, Goftam.com, is one of our new favorite bookmarks. The name of the site means “I said” in Persian, and its tag line is “All Iran, all the time.” Goftam.com aggregates feeds from English-language sites about Iran and Iranians (Pars Arts included) along with relevant news stories, for a one-stop site that helps you stay on top of what’s you care about. We asked Javod some questions about the site via email:

Why did you create Goftam.com?
While there are a lot of “linkdooni” sites out there, such as Hoder’s blogsbyiranians.com, they’re very poor in filtering out the fluff. Just because some guy is named Hassan and is Iranian doesn’t make pictures of his dog any more interesting than Jim’s in Nebraska.

How does it work?
I felt a site that had only relevant links about Iran and Persians was needed. And while RSS has done a lot of the work in getting us the content we want immediately, it’s still a pain to wade through the dozens of sites we want one at a time. So I created goftam.com, a site that not only shows the most frequently updated and relevant blog posts about Iran, but also retrieves up-to-the-minute news articles from all major English written news sites throughout the world.

How many feeds does it include? What sites?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. The news aggregator was written to retrieve as many sources as possible, so I assume it’s around 20-25 MSM [mainstream media] feeds; however, I personally filter the blogs. Currently blogs number at 10 and they are:

http://www.iraniantruth.com

http://jadi.civiblog.org/blog

http://zayyani.free.fr/blog

http://i4hrd.blogspot.com

http://omidmemarian.blogspot.com

http://arthemis11.blogspot.com

http://www.kamangir.net

http://www.eyeranian.net

http://persianperspective.wordpress.com

and last but certainly not least our very own http://parsarts.com

What are your criteria for including a new feed?
I’m always looking out for good new blogs about Iran and Iranians. Basically as long as the site’s content is predominately about Iran or Iranian related, it’s fairly well written (and I take into account if the writer is writing English as their second language), and it’s not disparaging to the Persian people, I’ll include it. I’m also open to suggestions; people can suggest a feed via Goftam.com.