Cord Blumquist put out a post over at Tech Liberation Front that detailed the latest in WordPress-related anti-censorware gear:

TextImage and Censortive, two plugins compatible with the most current versions of WordPress, are ingenious little bits of programming for skirting around the “Great Firewall” and any other attempts to censor the Net.  The two plugins work by turning some or all of the text of a blog post into .PNG images of those words—making them readable by humans, but not by machines set to filter out web pages featuring forbidden words like “Falun Gong” and “Dalai Lama.”

While TextImage will image-ify your whole post—the fail-safe way around the censors—Censortive allows users to create a list of likely-to-be-censored terms which will then be replaced with images of those words. This means that text is still search-able, but words considered off-limits by big brother won’t set off any flags at your local office of the cultural ministry. Simply Brilliant!

I’m continually amazed at the depth and value of the plugins found within the WordPress community.  There very literally is almost nothing that CMS platform can’t do, and it’s hard to imagine a reason why you wouldn’t want to use it for just about any project.

WordPress evangelism aside, that WordPress plugins now exist that with a few keystrokes have the ability to defeat the world’s most cutting edge censorship technologies would show (if they were savvy enough to listen) oppressive regimes of the world how ultimately futile it is to attempt to censor the truth.

It begs the question, though, why these oppressive regimes don’t reach out and embrace social media.  As was proven by the boys over at Mythbusters (and recently noted by Art Lindsay in a recent editorial here), it’s possible to polish a turd.  Open communications can cure a variety of ills – just ask @ComcastCares.

The Bandage of Social Media Covers a Variety of Grievous PR Wounds

Certainly, it’s not a sustainable strategy. Michelle Greer explored examples of what happens when your customer service sucks but your social media is great recently (Is Your Company’s Social Media Campaign Merely Gilded?).

Mark my words: the companies that see the greatest ROI by using social media will be the ones who focus on providing the best service instead of getting the most followers or being seen standing next to Jeremiah Owyang. We don’t care if you are social media famous– we care if we get value by using your goods and services. By listening and valuing our customers whether it’s via social media, the phone, or in person, we can foster sustainable brands that will always survive in the future.

The truth is, though, that customer service and social media usage frequently overlap, and political figures like our current President Barack Obama got away with simply broadcasting information uni-directionally across a Twitter account, and was lauded as the first tech president.

Political leaders seem to get a pass on tech savvy – who’s to say that if Hugo Chavez or Hu Jintao got on Twitter and answered a few questions, held a ‘twinterview,’ or even used a monitoring tool to track relevant trends and issued topical blog posts once in a while how much good will that would garner them.

Let’s go with a different, but slightly related topic to use as an object lesson.

It’s Technically Feasible for Yahoo to Sell Out 200k Bloggers to the Iranian Government

Remember earlier this month when ZD blogger Richard Koman published a post alleging that Yahoo turned over the identities of around 200,000 Yahoo Mail users in Iran to the oppressive regime during the turmoil of #IranElection?

It was widely debunked within hours – but did anyone stop to examine why it was debunked?

Probably not, or otherwise it wouldn’t have been debunked as quickly – the whole affair was quickly dismissed because … Yahoo said it didn’t happen.  That’s it.  No evidence to the contrary, nothing to conclusively discredit those who originated the rumor, and nothing to explain or analyze the questions raised regarding why Yahoo seemed to be uncensored quicker than other mainstream Western sites.

I don’t mean to re-kindle doubts as to the veracity of Yahoo’s statements.  I don’t know – I didn’t really dig deep on that story (as I was already deep-diving on another political story at the time), but Yahoo has a history of poor performance when it comes to dealing with impressive regimes.  One of the first ongoing stories I covered when I started with Mashable was the Jerry Yang hearings in congress, where he was ordered to explain why he turned over the email records of a Chinese dissident to the Chinese government.

As I said when first covered the story this month, while the story doesn’t pass the initial smell test (“Typically, when I find that a story is far too juicy to pass up, it’s generally too good to be true…”), occasionally that juicy story is true.  Was this one?  We may never know – Yahoo’s adept usage of social media to quickly respond to public outrage quelled the user-revolt before it began. 

Perhaps if Nokia employed this same technique after the Wall Street Journals’ libelous claim regarding Nokia-Siemens’ sale of Deep Packet Inspection to Iran, they wouldn’t be seeing a hit on product sales in the Pan-Asian markets.

And as Loren Feldman (and Chris Brogan) pointed out last year in that controversial Verizon debacle, once oppressive governmental regimes finally get a handle on how to use social media, we all might be in a world where clearly evil actions might not be as readily apparent.