We’ve been having a lot of fun with Mixwit recently. We did one for Metrotwin - a mixtape based on places in New York to match one that was done by one of Metrotwin’s blogging contributors Wee Birdy for London. Now we’ve gone and done one for our client Amnesty International UK to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Please suggest any other suitable songs/tracks in the comments area below.

Great news for civil liberties in our green and pleasant land: MPs have dropped their plans to extend detention without trial to 42 days.

This is in no small part due to the relentless efforts of Amnesty International UK and its supporters to highlight the issue with a national petition, and to encourage voters in 20 constituencies whose MPs were undecided on the issue that this is not something the British people want.

Protect The Human garnered a staggering 9,503 signatures for the “Say ‘No’ to 42 days!” petition. Online campaigning in action. If you haven’t seen the video produced by Dark Fibre with music from the Orb and voiceover by Christopher Eccleston (erstwhile Dr Who), go and take a look.

This lunchtime saw one of the first big pushes for Protect The Human in the wider web - our friends at Amnesty are raising awareness via BoingBoing of the plight of Troy Davis, condemned to death for a murder he maintains he did not commit.

It’s very exciting to see how the PTH platform gives Amnesty the tools it needs to quickly respond to issues as and when they arise - clemency was denied to Troy Davis a matter of days ago and with the potential to gather support from across the web using PTH to push out to Facebook, digg, delicious and others, Amnesty supporters could make the difference to obtain a total stay of execution.

Follow the conversation on Protect The Human, and take a five minute action to save a man’s life.

Our latest release, Protect The Human, a social campaigning platform developed for Amnesty International’s UK division, marks an important milestone in Made by Many’s life. It’s nearing our first birthday and on the back of the private beta release of Metrotwin, we quietly released Protect The Human to the world on Tuesday.

Today is the first day that the wider world’s attention will be drawn to Protect The Human as it sees the release of tickets for Amnesty’s Secret Policeman’s Ball and the announcement from the High Court that evidence from Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed is admissible in his case to escape the death penalty. His case has been highlighted by Amnesty’s Individuals at Risk campaign for the past few years. (You can help raise awareness of his plight by taking action on Protect The Human.)

The juxtaposition of these two events is classic Amnesty: the tricky balance of important human rights issues with the lighter side of life; and Made by Many, in collaboration with our Ruby on Rails development partner New Bamboo, are very proud to have played a part in helping Amnesty get the message out to the wider population.

We worked very closely with Amnesty to define their online campaigning needs and ambitions before entering into a period of service definition to flesh out exactly what the site would do and how. The close relationship with Amnesty and New Bamboo continued throughout the project’s design and development. We’re looking forward to the future as Amnesty’s commitment to the web as an additional campaigning channel grows.

The site was built over an intensive 3-month period using Agile project, design and development methodologies (more of which we’ll reveal in a future blog post) and in true Agile style, the site will continue to be improved with iterative releases. Keep an eye on the site (and this blog) for release of more features over the coming weeks.

So what can you do on Protect The Human? Well, you can share, comment on and bookmark content from around the web to spread the word about human rights issues that matter to you.

And you can show your support by contributing the smallest action. What we’re aiming to do is to encourage more people to get involved with human rights without banging the drum and coming over all heavy-handed.

Your contribution can be as quick as a comment on a video, gallery or bookmark you’ve seen on Protect The Human. Or you could send it to a friend. For anyone who wants to spend a little more time, users can add their own bookmarks, create their gallery of images or upload a video relating to human rights.

We anticipate that the site will significantly contribute to Amnesty UK’s target to engage with 1 million people by 2011.

Stay tuned for a case study on the project with more detail on how we worked together with both Amnesty and New Bamboo.