Monthly Archives: February 2006

International Free Speech News via RSS/OPML

So my friend Curt Hopkins, director of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, has been ranting lately about how few international human rights organizations offer RSS feeds for their news and updates. This is pretty frustrating, but is just one part of the larger problem of slow adoption of key tools. If group’s don’t feel inclined to start tagging things in del.icio.us, that’s fine – but the least you can do is give me an RSS feed I can subscribe to so I don’t have to come back to your site all the time to look for new items. Because I’m not going to and neither are a growing number of people. Just let us subscribe!

So, for a variety of reasons I’ve used a number of different tools to put together the following resource, an OPML file containing RSS feeds from the following organizations who do not offer feeds of their own, or don’t offer feeds of these particular items on their sites:

Here’s the file: Free Speech Feeds

So you can grab that file right up there by right clicking on a PC and saving the linked file, or holding CTRL on a Mac and clicking on it to get the download option. It will appear on your computer as FreeSpeechFeeds.aspx.xml. Then you can go to your feed reader and import that file to subscribe to the whole list at once.

In Bloglines you can go to “My Feeds” then “edit” and look at the bottom of the left pane to find “Import Subscriptions.” In Newsgator you can go to “Add Feeds” then “URL or Import” and either import from there or just paste the above link right into the URL box.

In Newsgator you are given the option of subscribing to all the feeds at once or just some of them with check boxes. The feeds will be by name in a folder called “Free Speech News.” This is WAY better than in Bloglines, where importing the file will just dump a bunch of ugly URLs into your general My Feeds folder. This is one of many reasons I like Newsgator better than Bloglines! (Go give it a try at NewsGator username: marshalldemo pw: welcome )

Info on how this was created after the fold. Continue reading →

Amnesty International On Yahoo!

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Good to see that Amnesty International is calling on its supporters to challenge Yahoo! for their roll in the recent imprisonment of a Chinese journalist. From the first paragraphs of the story there:

Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, is serving a ten-year prison sentence in China for sending an email to the USA. He was accused of “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities” by using his Yahoo email account.

According to the court transcript of the evidence that led to Shi Tao’s sentencing, the US internet company Yahoo provided account-holder information on him.

Shi Tao was accused of sending an email summarizing an internal Communist Party directive to a foreign source. The Communist Party directive had warned Chinese journalists of possible social unrest during the anniversary of the June 4 Movement (in memory of the Tiananmen crackdown), and directed them not to fuel it via media reports.

Here’s a list of articles concerning Yahoo in China over at the very worth visiting Committee to Protect Bloggers. Shi Tao is just one of a number of folks internationally who are in prison for their electronic communication.

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