With many sources of information blocked in Iran, englishbaby.com, a social network for people who are learning English,  offers a unique breadth of voices from the country’s English-speaking youth. Unlike Twitter and Facebook which are monitored by the state as well as the media and can so full of posts on Iran they are chaotic, English, baby! is home to unfettered and well-thoughout discussion among the site’s 10,000 Iranian members and the million more around the world.

This forum begins with a list made by a 16-year-old named Payam of all the good qualities of Iran, which he hopes are not forgotten during this time.

In this forum thread, the longest on the topic on Ebaby!, Tufan, a 24-year-old Iranian man, says that many people’s opinions of the current regime have changed since the election: “Now even people who voted to Ahmadinejad are regret for their decision when they see how he treats to demonstrators.”

But 19-year-old amirlashkari22 (pictured above) says he thinks the violence against protesters in his country was necessary to prevent further chaos: “If they don’t [shoot protesters] you ppl would fire much more stores, supermarkets, banks and buses.”

Many of the participants of the discussion are Iranian, but people from around the world frequently chime in and give their thoughts. Sali, a 27-year-old Algerian is disappointed to see Iran come undone, because she looks up to the nation. “We are prouvd of iran as mulim and devloped country,” she says

English, baby! is glad to provide a place where people from all countries can share their thoughts on this crisis in a common language. We hope our site continues to evade censorship in Iran.

We were happy to discover that over the weekend we were named one of the top three sites for learning conversational English by Larry Ferlazzo, king of ESL website reviews and best of lists.

This is our first appearance on one of Larry’s lists and it makes sense since it’s a pretty general category, and like Larry says, we offer “the works.” A lot of the rest of the top eight was new to me. One site I particularly liked was ELLLO (English Language Listening Library Online). Their dialogs are pretty similar to ours and I think they’re improvised too. But their cast speaks a heck of a lot slower!

A commenter on the post brought up a good idea that I’d like to see on English, baby! someday: live chat rooms. Our chat rooms are one of the most popular features on the site, but they’re for typing. What if we had chat rooms that used a Skype-like platform so people could talk in real time? That would be cool.

Image: Larry Ferlazzo’s mug as seen on his site.