Amnesty International is doing some innovative work with a web plug-in tool to enlist web site and blog owners to help Amnesty in its work to promote political freedom of expression.

On it's site Irrepressible Info, Amnesty provides a set of code snippets that easily be inserted on a web site or blog. (Took this clumsy non-techie about 10 min to set it up - see the resulting icon and text on the lower right hand side of this page.)

The code generates a small window which shows a fragment of text from a web site or blog that has been censored by some country:

The examples of censored material used for Irrepressible.info have been drawn from websites that have been blocked in one of the following countries – China, Iran, Myanmar, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Syria and Vietnam, and are based on latest testing results available from each country.

By enlisting other web sites like this one to install the widget, Amnesty helps to undermine the efforts of government censors. (Yeah!)

Thanks to Kurt Voelker for the tip.

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irrepressible.info
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Over at the AUInteractive blog, there's a great listing about the "10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website," or for that matter, any web-based application. It lists a few things I need to learn more about (Askimet)... and is worth reading the full text - but a quick summary:

1. EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program.
2. Visual design and copy are extremely important.
3. Open up your data as much possible.
4. Test, test, test.
5. Release features early and often.
6. Be special.
7. Don’t be special.
8. If you plan on developing a successful webapp, plan for scalability from the ground up.
9. Watch, pay attention to, or implement right away: Microformats, Adobe Apollo, Whobar, Akismet
10. User generated content and social software trends: Not working: Requiring participation from square 1…. Working: Giving users control, being open to different uses you did not anticipate...

Well done.