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True Love Will Find You in the End

Paul Boag has has relaunched Boagworld with an interesting take, mostly in agreement with Zeldman. I have to disagree. I would argue that we will continue to see personal sites for some time to come but that they will be based on CMS systems like Wordpress or Movable Type.

Like a marketing department in any company you need to figure out how to use facebook , flickr etc to bring traffic to your personal site. Once visiors are on your site you have the opportunity to promote yourself allot more than you would on the one size fits all facebook type sites.

The Jody Ferry example in the Zeldman article is just lazy.

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Personal Sites dead?

Today Wikileaks released over 120 censored photos and videos of the Tibet uprising and has called on bloggers around the world to help drive the footage through the Chinese internet censorship regime — the so called “Great Firewall of China”.

The transparency group’s move comes as a response to the the Chinese Public Security Bureau’s carte-blanche censorship of youtube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and other sites carrying video footage of the Tibetan people’s recent heroic stand against the inhumane Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Wikileaks has also placed the collection in two easy to use archives together with a HTML index page so they may be easily copied, placed on websites, emailed across the internet as attachments and uploaded to peer to peer networks.

Censorship, like communism, seems like a reasonable enough idea to begin with. While ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need’ sounds unarguable, the world has learned that these words call forth a power elite to administer them with coercive force. Such elites are quick to define the needs of their own members as paramount. Similarly ‘from each mouth according to its ability and to each ear according to its need’ seems harmless enough, but history shows that censorship also requires an anointed class to define this “need” and to make violence against those who continue talking. Such power is quickly corrupted.

The first ingredient of civil society is the people’s right to know, because without such understanding no human being can meaningfully choose to support anything, let alone a political party. Knowledge is the driver of every political process, every constitution, every law and every regulation. The communication of knowledge is without salient analogue. It is living, unique and demands its rightful place at the summit of society. Since knowledge is the creator and regulator of all law, its position beyond law commands due respect.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and other Enlightenment framers of the US Bill of Rights understood this well when they began the First Amendment’s constitutional protections of speech and of the press with ‘Congress shall make no law….’.

As knowledge flows across the world it is time to sum great freedoms of every nation and not subtract or divide them. Let us then unite in common purpose for the surest way to protect the freedoms of any nation is to protect the freedoms of every nation.

Censored Tibet March 2008 protest photos (92 photos on a single page)

leak:tibet-protest-photos.zip (92 photo archive)

Censored Tibet March 2008 protest videos - display (35 flash videos on page)

Censored Tibet March 2008 protest videos - FLV format (Flash archive)

Censored Tibet March 2008 protest videos - AVI format (AVI/mpeg4 archive)

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Tibet uprising

Although it drives millions of weblogs all over the world, WordPress is a powerful publishing platform that is increasingly being used to power online magazines and other news-driven Web sites; sites that fall outside the domain of ‘blogs’. Contrary to popular belief, WordPress isn’t just a ‘blogging application’. It can be (and is being) used for a whole lot more.

The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress created by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme. The theme design is grid-based and has the following requested features.

Thanks hope to donate soon.

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The Materplan