Looking over this year’s TIGMOO.co.uk league table of UK union bloggers, it’s clear that the last year has seen a lot of new activity. Now over a third of the top 25 union blogs are new entries for 2009.

Union and political blogs in the USA continue to point the way, with insider commentary from LaborNerd, effective online campaigning from SEIU blog, or comprehensive and timely labour movement coverage from AFL-CIOnow. But things are growing over here too.

René Lavanchy’s blog offers unique insights into the UK labour movement, and more official national union blogs have been launched, with sites like PCS Comment or Stronger Unions trying to engage more closely with the membership. Policy blogs ToUChstone and Connected Research have joined more established ones like Labour and Capital to reach out beyond the movement and represent union ideas to the wider policy blogging community.

2009 has also seen blogs used to co-ordinate campaigns and disputes, with the excellent work done by the Keep Burberry British blog last year being continued by activists involved in the Vestas dispute on the Isle of Wight, and the Save 600 Jobs at Vestas blog has been the most heavily updated on the whole network.

More blogs are also being used to help network local union organisations. Port of Felixstowe Unite, PCS Euston Branch and Barnet UNISON, amongst others are becoming established and useful presences online for their respective branches.

Blogs have also helped give an extra dimension to union election campaigns, with all the candidates in the recent Unite Amicus JGS election fielding commentable online communications for the first time.

And the range of tools used has increased too. The international volunteer network LabourStart have launched UnionBook.org, a union specific social network, offering powerful networking tools free to union organisers (a safer option for many than the major networks like Facebook, which have banned

individual union activists or terminated campaigns in recent years). UnionBook has a blogging tool, integrated within their supportive community, and already two of its bloggers are represented on TIGMOO.co.uk.

Twitter has also burst onto the blogging scene in a bigger way, with UK politicians keenly taking up the opportunities to report back to constituents or to crowdsource opinion with this fashionable microblogging service. Unions are now starting to make use of Twitter to make contact with members too.

@NUSuk, @WorkersUniting, @EquityUK, @UnitetheUnion, @UNISONtweets, @LabourStart and others have already amassed creditable levels of followers. And an international union Twibe at twibes.com/union collates trade union Twitter accounts in a similar way to TIGMOO.co.uk.

We’ve also seen the TIGMOO.co.uk union blog aggregator model extended to Canada with the launch of the new site UnionBlogs.ca, and word is that a US version is now in the pipeline. Who knows, next year could see us go international – Bloggers of the world, unite!

Note: Article republished from TIGMOO.co.uk guide to union blogging 2009, after some helpful comments on not hiding it away in a pdf – apologies to anyone who read it already!