Section 14

ScoopIt is Scoop’s new social news bookmarking site. If you use WordPress with the Sociable social bookmarking plugin (they’re the little icons across the bottom of each story, for those of you not keeping up) you might like to add ScoopIt to your Sociable set-up. Warning: Geekiness follows.

(For those not using Sociable, the instructions are on ScoopIt’s blog.)

Save the icon on the left and upload it to your blog’s wp-content/plugins/sociable/images folder with the filename ’scoopit.png’.

Open your wp-content/plugins/sociable/sociable.php file and add the following code in the $sociable_known_sites array:

Add the following code to the $sociable_files array in the same file:

'images/scoopit.png',

In your blog’s admin area, add the ScoopIt icon to your active list.

Ministry of Social Development (of which Child, Youth and Family - CYF - is a part) CEO Peter Hughes’ decision to try and censor the CYFSWatch blog has badly backfired.

As of Friday afternoon, the site is still up and running. Google has so far stood firm - talking to the NZ Herald, Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand said,

We only remove content from a blog if it expressly violates the terms of service or if ordered to do so by a court order.

And public interest is huge. No one would ever have heard of this site if Hughes hadn’t launched his doomed censorship campaign.

As an indicator of how much interest there is in this now, traffic to this blog has more than doubled since I posted on the topic on Wednesday lunchtime. The top ten search queries landing here at the moment are:

1. cyfswatch
2. cyfs blog
3. cyf blog
4. cyf name and shame
5. cyfs watch
6. cyfswatch blog
7. name and shame
8. cyf
9. cyf watch
10. cyfswatch new zealand

and so on into at least the top thirty.

I would refer Hughes to my previous post on Scarcity and ‘psychological reactance’, which pointed out that censorship not only makes people far more interested in the information under threat, but also makes them more inclined to believe it.

I’m off on holiday for Christmas and New Year. If only those who know better than us and would like to tell us how to think and what to say would do the same…

I’ll be back in mid-January. Between now and then blogging will be intermittent at best. Until then, have a good break and see you back here in the New Year.

Bernard Darnton (bernard.darnton@freespeech.org.nz)

Two reference tools have been added to FreeSpeech.org.nz, a ‘Landmarks in Free Speech‘ timeline and a free speech glossary.

(At the moment the timeline is best viewed in Firefox. In IE7 it’s a bit crap, in IE6 it’s very crap. I’m looking into it.)

The timeline has been filled with a couple of dozen events so far and, likewise, the glossary has a couple of dozen terms to get started.

Both of these will be expanded over time as various terms and events are discussed here and based on users’ suggestions. So what’s missing that you’d like to see included?

UPDATE 16/11/06: The ‘page not found’ problem in Internet Explorer and IE6’s layout problems have been fixed. The problem with the detail bubbles not staying visible has not been fixed.