Irrepressible
When checking out the website of David Knopfler, indeed, the brother of Mark, I stumbled upon the Amnesty sponsored irrepressible.info.
There, you can support the anti-censorship lobby, where said website uses slightly more web-savvy ways to build awareness.
For one, you can put a widget on your website which will display a piece of text from some website, which is censored, somewhere. If not practical, it’s certainly novel.
You can also check out what websites have written about irrepressible. However that listing, obviously, with the most recent posting some 15 months old is not up to date, which can be confirmed by looking at the Technorati entry, which is supposed to display the exact same information.
Also, I find the name irrepressible a bit unfortunate. It has been shown that for understanding a piece of text, readers focus more on the start and end of individual words than on what’s inbetween. As a rselut, a setnnece lkie tihs is sitll qitue radeblae.
So, quickly glancing over the website, the first few times I read “irresponsible”, not “irrepressible”. Perhaps not such a good choice of domain name, then.
But it’s not all bad. I really like their news section, where they compare ‘good’ with ‘bad’ news, relating to censorship. However here, too, the rather old news articles show that the website is not actively maintained, which is a pity.
Surely, an organization like Amnesty International can spend one employee for a few hours per week, maintaining a straightforward website like this.
There’s one aspect which does really kick ass. They have an API, which would allow developers to mash up censored content into their own web based application.
So, for the sake of support, here’s one of their widgets.