Supported online initiatives and ideas
I support the initiatives listed below, and find that any responsible, thoughtful Netizen should. They are about human rights, cyberliberty, freedom of speech/bits and the progress and well‐being of the online community. They touch us all. Check them out.
The Blue Ribbon Campaign puts the word out for the freedom of speech and tolerance on the Net. When we take into consideration the seemingly ever‐increasing pressure to censor and govern the Internet, the goal of this project is vital to the survival of the online culture. The campaign was started by the EFF and has found wide support online.
CAFE advocates broad freedom of audio‐visual expression, but this time mostly in opposition to the atmosphere of legalism, the culture of expansive interpretation of copyright and, generally, the many contemporary attempts to make information ownable. CAFE is a continuing effort by the EFF.
I'm a firm supporter of the Free (in both senses of the word) and Open Source models of software development. But my main contributions are more in the line of content. Support for Open Content follows naturally.
I'm an advocate of strong cryptography. I think people shouldn't be afraid of taking their privacy back. Back from whom? Ask those who have trouble with crypto; governments immediately spring to mind.
I'm an abolitionist as well—in addition to moral reasons (civil liberty), I think that it would be a true victory for utilitarianism if we legalized drugs. See, drug criminalization bears much resemblance to the Prohibition. Even Finnish people damn well know what that implies… The Drug Policy Alliance is one of the few fortresses of sound thought on drug policy. Check their site out, it'll be an enlightening experience.
There is entirely too much poor content online. People really should think more about what they web.
I ain't much for political correctness, either.
What can you say, I'm a classical liberal. That makes one a principled capitalist whatever way one thinks about it.
It just so happens that libertarians also advocate drug legalization. Cannabis is the obvious and best known example, though I'm of the opinion all drugs should be treated equally.
I am an atheist and a freethinker. Take a look at the Infidels to know more.
In addition to the above political movements, I advocate some specific technologies. These mostly have to do with accessibility, standards compliance and syntactic purity of Web sites.
In most respects I agree with the people of the WSP. They advocate writing sites to standards and evangelizing to people about the importance of standards compatible newer browsers. Like them, I believe that if my standards compatible pages do not show correctly, the fault really isn't mine, especially since real compatibility with a neolithic version of a standard might actually make graceful degradation possible.
This site uses machine validated CSS only. I'm a firm supporter of syntactic purity.
This site uses machine validated XHTML 1.1 for all of its HTML content (but not XML). As in the case of CSS, purity is the key.
This site aspires to W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 conformance, description available at http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI‐WEBCONTENT‐19990505. The site eventually aims at level Triple‐A, but isn't quite there, yet.
I believe that webmasters should do their best in order to make the Web accessible to as many people as possible. This includes those who do not, for one reason of principle or another, want to see (or want their children to see) material they consider inappropriate. Producing proper content helps these people, so I think it is a good thing. So is content labelling. This site is PICS labelled with, amongst others, ICRA's and SafeSurf's rating systems. (Of course, it would be even better if people were just tolerant and raised their offspring to understand and appreciate the spectrum of human endeavor online. We wouldn't need filtering then…)
I believe frames to, basically, be the devil's newest scheme. I mean, nothing else could irritate a man that thoroughly.
RDF and the Semantic Web are a friend.
FOAF is one of the best Semantic web applications today.