From football and feminism to partying and politics, she writes on a range of subjects with a wit and passion that have made her online diary one of the most popular in Iran. Her fans call her the "emotional voice of Iran's Generation X".

Taking aim at the strict dress code for women, she grumbled recently about a guard who forbade her entry into a hotel for a business meeting "cuz I wasn't wearing socks!!".

On another occasion, as a supporter of AC Milan and its "handsome", players, she wrote evocatively about hearing the sound of cool rain on her bedroom window as she watched a football match on television.

She is a university professor in her mid-20s who teaches English but, like most authors of online journals in Iran, she does not use her real name, identifying herself as only as LadySun.

Online journals such as hers (ladysun.blogspot.com) have proliferated as an alternative communication in the Islamic Republic. They provide a fascinating insight into a closed society, airing issues that may be taboo in public and revealing the underground lives of many young Iranians.

For some, weblogs are an opportunity to write about boyfriends or girlfriends, to discuss the films and music, or to dwell on their fears and aspirations.

LadySun calls her digital jottings "my naked observations from this crazy world of words and worries and wishes".

Most online diaries in Iran are not political. But, with the old guard's prolonged crackdown on the reform press, weblogs, as cheap and easy ways to publish, are regarded as a potentially important tool for change.

Most write from inside Iran, so their personal journals cannot be branded as American-backed by Islamic conservatives who last month, for the first time, began blocking pornography and other websites deemed obscene or subversive, although the curbs are less drastic than those in nearby Gulf Arab states.

"They [blogs] are individual, they're new and they're in Iran - this is the most important thing," Hossein Derakhshan, 28, who was a journalist for reformist newspapers in Iran before moving to Canada two years ago.

He worked out an easy way to show Persian letters and characters of the internet and Iran's 20,000 bloggers now use the computer protocol he devised.

Like many Iranian bloggers, the term given to regular contributors to weblogs, his focus was not on politics. He wanted to keep in touch with the Iran he had left behind. "I was worried that if I came back after a few years I wouldn't even know the slang and youth culture," he told The Times.

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