This Soda News item was written on 1 November 06.
Due to the massive success of irrepressible.info’s launch earlier this year the site was swiftly internationalised with the addition of French, Spanish and Arabic language versions. Irrepressible’s continued appeal has now driven the release of another suite of features to further boost the acclaimed campaign against Internet related censorship and repression.
The site has seen tremendous growth in the last few months and ranked amongst the 5,000 most popular web sites worldwide (source: alexa.com). Irrepressible.info’s database of censored material has been accessed globally more than 39,000,000 times through it’s supporting blogs and websites (new feature). Crucially the campaigns’ popularity has led to more than 50,000 people signing the pledge, greatly exceeding the original goal of 30,000 signatories.
With the new API (Application programming interface) Soda gives developers the means to build their own applications that can access and use Amnesty’s extensive database of censored material. The incredibly successful banner system is just such an application, allowing web site owners to re-publish censored material on their own sites. While the banners raised awareness and made irrepressible.info such a success, they have certain limitations which the API can help overcome. Irrepressible.info is for example currently not compatible with the hugely popular myspace.com, thus missing out on the opportunity for the millions of myspace users to show their support. The banners are also not very immune to censorship themselves, something that could be greatly improved by the use of the API to create custom plug-ins for common blogging platforms and systems.
There is of course plenty of room for creative play with these new tools and we will be delighted to showcase whatever applications you devise to help spread the word! So if you are a developer check out the new API and see if it inspires you to help make irrepressible.info even more accessible to even more people!
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