Five Useful OPML Files

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 →

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!

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: , , , , , , , ,

No Feed For Skype News?

Wow, I was shocked to just see that the Skype press releases page doesn’t have an RSS feed! May those who enjoy playing “How Web 2.0 Is…” keep this in mind!

I set one up by scraping the page with http://www.wotzwot.com – a service I’ve never used before. I tried Feedfire.com (my old favorite) and FeedTier, but neither could do what I was looking for. So we’ll see about this new service, at least it’s new to me.

Sorry, I forgot to provide the URL for the Skype News feed: Skype News Hope that’s of interest to some one out there!

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , ,

Interview with Nancy White

Nancy White is an incredible woman. She did a long Skype interview with me for Net Squared last week and I hope readers here will go check it out. Here’s more on Nancy from my intro to the interview:

Nancy White provides strategic communication, online community development, facilitation, marketing, and project management services for the community, non-profit and business sectors through Full Circle Associates, her Seattle, Washington based consultancy.

Nancy is on the advisory boards for BlogHer, Knowledge in the Public Interest and works with many other organizations. She helped set up and has been a key facilitator of the March of Dimes’ ShareYourStory blog community for parents with children in neonatal Intensive Care Units.

Google Images China on Tiananmen vs. Our Images of Ourselves

This is interesting, you’ve read about the bizarre combo of Google refusing to give up US search documentation on one hand but agreeing to censor what Chinese users can see at the behest of the Chinese government on the the other hand. Check out what Google China users see when they do an image search for Tienanmen. That’s a popular page to link to in the blogsphere today.

Witness the shocking difference between that and, for example, a US Google user’s image search results for Christopher Columbus. Comparably benign, are they not?

So while it would be no small technological achievement for Google to successfully hide the images that the rest of the world associates with Tiananmen from the Chinese people themselves, I would contend that they still have a ways to go before they can rival the scale of cultural “information organization”/obfuscation that goes on all the time in the United States.

Like what? US history aside even, how about the following:

  • “Current estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion in illegal funds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half going through U.S. financial institutions.” US Senator Carl Levin
  • “Trafficking of women and children for the sex industry and for labor is prevalent in all regions of the United States. An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are trafficked annually to the United States…” From Cia.gov
  • “The U.S. has the largest per capita prison and jail population in the Western industrialized world, with approximately 2 million inmates…As Americans continue to recoil at the sight of photographs and videotapes showing handcuffed prisoners piled naked on top of one another, being bitten by dogs, being sexually exploited and subjected to other forms of debasing abuse at the Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq, human rights advocates say similar constitutional violations occur on a regular basis in United States prisons.” via Common Dreams.

We may be able to find these things on the internet in the US (the fact that they are true is bad enough) but how often do we discuss or consider them? Isn’t the effect similar at least?
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , ,

From the Garden to the Law Library: Web 2.0 Applied

I just posted two new interviews over at NetSquared. The first was with Abby Rosenheck from Urban Sprouts, a SF school gardens project with a blog. I think she offers a great explanation of the support-building function a blog can play, especially for a small organization.

The second was with legal blawger Dennis Kennedy. We talked about a whole lot things, but the discussion about OPML was most exciting to me because I’m on an OPML kick these past 24 hours. We also talked about blogging, RSS, wikis, legal research and the law.