Internetcafe Teheran

Popular wisdom has it that blogging is the natural counterpoint to Iran's revolutionary mullahs with their knee-jerk hostility to free speech. The country's vast army of bloggers - up to 110,000 strong, according to one October 2005 estimate - are widely assumed in the west to be computer-savvy foot soldiers in a loud clamour for political change.

But the Iranian blogging craze is attracting a quite different set of adherents, whose goal is to cement and protect the achievements of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Diniblog.com , a website run by the Office of Weblog Expansion, based in the Iranian shrine city of Qom, is championing blogging as the latest state-of-the-art means of upholding and communicating revolutionary values. The office's website (which is available only in Farsi) describes blogging as the "most efficient approach for calling to virtue and discouraging vice in cyberspace". It adds: "The open borders of cyberspace are not a licence for breaking the structures of political concepts."

Now the office is taking steps to ensure the bloggers under its wing are instilled with the right level of ideological fervour by taking them on a five-day camping tour of "martyrs sites", sacred spots where Iranian volunteers died during the bloody 1980-88 war with Iraq. The expedition is being called From Blog to Plaque (signifying the metal number plates the soldiers wore round their necks as they went into battle). To get into the spirit, the bloggers will sleep in the very trenches where a previous generation of Iranians faced Saddam Hussein's armies. The idea is that they reproduce the ideological spirit imbibed in future blogs.

It is an illustration of the Islamic regime's determination not to be wrong-footed by the internet revolution.

As the Guardian's Tehran correspondent, I reported nearly 18 months ago on how the mullahs were jumping on the blogging bandwagon by training clerics and theology students to set up their own sites. Iranian blogging had, ironically, gained momentum in reaction to the mass closure of left-leaning newspapers by conservative hardliners as they sought to snuff out the liberalising measures of the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, who held office between 1997 and 2005. Its popularity is such that Technorati, an internet search engine, lists Farsi amongst the top 10 blogging languages - a status apparently out of keeping with its number of speakers and Iran's relatively modest level of economic development.

But the Iranian authorities have fought hard to keep pace with developments. After an early period in which the internet was largely uncensored, filtering of opposition - and even mildly critical - websites is now widespread. Mohammad Hossein Saffar-Harandi, Iran's culture and Islamic guidance minister, has pioneered a scheme requiring all web sites to be registered. Those registering are expected to observe vaguely-defined official red lines on what to write. Non-registered sites will be considered illegal and liable to prosecution. Meanwhile, the semi-official Mehr agency reports that 17 internet cafe in Tehran operate.