I just checked out the Net Squared podcast channel at Odeo today. It’s pretty cool, worth subscribing to for sure. If you’ve got any interest in Net Squared you should give one of the 15 minute updates a listen. They are far better produced than anything I could do with audio, thanks (I think) to the work of Eddie Codel of Geek Entertainment TV. You’ll also hear lots of Britt Bravo over there. Good stuff: Web 2.0 meets non profits.
A few posts I’ve made elsewhere recently that I want to make sure readers here are aware of:
Sheesh, I’m refusing to write anything (except this) about Google today, I’m just sick of it and it’s driving me nuts. The Google Page Creator, Google Finance, Google Base payment systemGoogle partners with the US national archives, Google’s Mac Widgets. Those are all within like the last 24 hours. There’s some links if you haven’t read about any of those stories. Students for a Free Tibet have NoLuv4Google and I’m just burnt out on writing and reading about them.
Resource Shelf feed item today took me to the National Security Archives at George Washington University, long one of my favorite sources of information. Of course they don’t have an RSS feed. So I scraped one using Wotzwot, did the same with two other good sources of information about US Government documents supressed, released and otherwise. Here’s an OPML file: US Gov Watch Dogs 
If you are unfamiliar with OPML, in this case it’s a file you can copy and paste into your RSS reader to subscribe to multiple feeds at once. See also this post of scraped feeds from international free speech watch dog organizations.
Please note that these are sources of pretty hard core information. I’ll let you take care of your own patriotism, but you might want to watch out for your stomach in regards to both images and text on these sites. Likewise, they are definitely sites of interest to federal authorities, particularly Cryptome. Just so you know.
The file contains:
Since these are scraped feeds, they are sometimes kind of slow, but they are sure better than nothing.
I’ve been wanting to put together some good OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files all week, inspired by Anne Zelenka’s giant Blogher file and the conversation I had with legal blogger Dennis Kennedy about the incredible potential for this medium.
An OPML file is, in this case, a single file you can use to subscribe to a number of RSS (definition) feeds all at once. This means that with one link you are subscribed to all future content from selected sources. I think that selecting a handful of key feeds in certain topic areas and offering those to other people is going to be a powerful way that information-overload gatekeepers help the rest of the world find and easily subscribe to the best news sources available. In this sense everyone who puts together OPML files is like an editor of anthologies; only the authors that the editor selects provide ongoing, dynamic contributions.
Without further theoretical ado, I’ll tell you how to use these files and then tell you what I’ve put in them.
Continue reading
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
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.
TagCentral Tags: ShiTao, Yahoo, CPB, AI, Amnesty, bloggers, prison, China, Web2.0