First Nigel roundly berates the left blogohemisphere for our lack of a coherent critique of the current financial crisis (gulp), but then his colleagues Adam and Janet very kindly go and plug up the gap a bit themselves, at least enough to keep me safe for opinions at dinner parties for a little while (now all I need is an invite…)

Iain Dale made a flying visit to Congress today - He doesn’t seem to have been impressed enough to hang around with us. Iain may lack Richard Balfe’s staying power (he’s been lurking in the corridors outside the hall for days now) but it looks like did shift a few copies of his Total Politics Guide to Blogging (as ever a lovely list-fest for blogging trainspotters, with the ‘top’ 200 political blogs listed).

So given the Dale shaped hole in Congress this afternoon, may I present the TIGMOO.co.uk Guide to Blogging - a slender cash-in volume for us union bloggers - with its own little list.

You can download a copy here - you know you want to.

Here’s my post in transatlantic solidarity with Take Back Labor Day’s Labour Day 08 Blogswarm, a US labor bloggers’ attempt to get people thinking about the meaning behind the September 1st holiday.

This is a nice idea, as Labor Day as it stands is a bit of an oddity. Only the US, Canada and New Zealand celebrate it in September. The rest of the world stick with International Workers’ Day on 1 May (May Day), a day more closely identified with the labour movement, which sees big rallies and union events in many European countries.

But the strangest part of this is that the Yanks themselves invented our May Day, and then backed away from partying with us. What the rest of the world is celebrating on May 1 is actually the struggle and great successes of the American labour movement in fighting for the 8-hour working day. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s prettier than anything purporting to categorise me has any right to be. Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds - is just that. It’s a clever little site that interprets documents, or in this case RSS feeds (the one from this here blog), and makes clouds to highlight common themes. Very much fun playing with it, and I’m indebted to Someday I Will Treat You Good for the tip.

Happy to see evidence that, whether my labor-geek interests are going anywhere or not, above all I’m trying

Look at this. It certainly looks the business.

In recent years, Labour seem to have eschewed the Tories’ strategy of slick New Media launches, aimed at offline column inches rather than online impact. From ‘Dave in India’, through Webcameron’s diminishing returns, to the recent banner ads, the Tories have very pragmatically spent online in order to look innovative to the offline majority, who will never actually bother with this politico-geekery themselves. It didn’t matter really what they did, so long as they looked stylish, modern and open, and had enough buzzwords on-site to impress the scribblers.

Put against this, Labour seem in the last year to have taken this web stuff all a bit too seriously. Rather than media launches, they’ve worked through a bunch of policy consultations, and tools designed to up their supporters’ web literacy. The byzantine MPURLs system is a world away from Webcameron, and seems to show a party actually looking for ways to take the technology seriously. Focusing internaly has had benefits in building a core of activists who are web literate, and I think is the correct strategy long term, but it’s let the Tories lap us more than once in the race to be seen as innovative. Read the rest of this entry »

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen seems to be on the defensive this week. It looks like someone asked him why he doesn’t have a blog just one time too many, and his latest weekly article is about how a real expert should set themselves apart from the madding crowds of the blogosphere and focus on quality content.

This is an approach that’s done him well over the years, and seen him crowned King of all things web 1.0. I’m not so convinced he’s on the money with this though, or that anyone setting out to be an ‘expert’ like him would be best served following his lead.

I stopped actually reading his Alertbox column about a year ago, when I noticed his feature articles were sometimes just repeating themselves from previous years. I just never got around to unsubscribing from it.

Nielsen believes that your expert quality comes out best in serious articles. Even the best expert writes bad blog posts from time to time, so effort put into this (and all the trackback-slapping to build buzz) is wasted and gets you lost in the morass of mediocrity out there. I think this is all very well & good if you were in from the beginning, and have a mailing list the size of Nielsen’s one, but for new would-be experts, it maps out a very slow path to recognition, if you actively choose not to use the networking capabilities of Web2.0 to engage with your peers/fans.

Another expert who I do read a lot more now is the Chad-like guru of permission marketing, Seth Godin. He takes the opposite track to Nielsen and posts whatever he’s pondered on the drive to work (in his Prius, natch) or happened to see on the back of a milk carton. The idea is that he’s still the expert, but he’s having a conversation to develop new thinking. And a conversation gets you talked about.

His scatter-gun epistles are sometimes wrong (often getting him more links than the less controversil ones), so then he posts equally speedy updates, keeping the conversation going. Overall, I disagree with him more than often with Nielsen, but I read him much more as his little insights have more variety and are fun as 30 second thought provokers.

But who’s right? Well, I convinced a former boss to part with £150 for a conference place to see Nielsen’s ‘98 tour, but have only dipped far enough into my pocket to buy one of Godin’s books (1999’s Permission Marketing) - I can’t afford his live appearances! So on the balance sheet, Nielsen is winning.

The time honoured method of a FIGHT! is inconclusive, but the lines never lie - Nielsen is slumping on the links, and Godin is growing, which I think is a good pointer. I’m aware that I’m hardly the target market (£250k consultancies), and also aware that Godin’s armies of trackbackers are also probably not going to do more than download the ebooks he’s generous enough to give away (a way of doing Nielsen’s serious articles even more seriously, but very rarely), but he does seem to be propelling himself into überexpertness faster than Nielsen did.

Not so clever. For someone who purports to be interested in unions and blogging I shouldn’t really have missed comment on my own union running a live conference blog last week. I do have the half-excuse that I’m only just back from hols at a pal’s farmhouse in rural Spain, where the landlines haven’t ever got to - let alone the wireless networks, so I’ve been web-starved for much longer than I’d like to be again!

So first in my bookmark list is going to be looking over the whole of the “100 Years of the NUJ” ADM blog, and seeing what I missed whilst I was busy sunning myself.

Congrats to the NUJ for doing this - A group blog like this gives you a good feel for an event, as well as letting members read and comment on the goings on at conference. Other unions like the RMT have webcast theirs, which is also good, but I think I’d prefer a blog format as a member, as it’s easier to cherry-pick from, without knowing the running order or sitting through bits that don’t interest me (shameful to admit I know, but there might be the odd moment I could nip out for!).

A very interesting project from the European Metalworkers’ Federation (though they’re a bit shy and you wouldn’t know it was them from looking at the site).

The General Motors Workers’ Blog lets workers at General Motors around the world sign up and add their own posts to a central news service of what GM management is up to in each others’ countries.

The idea is to beat divide-and-conquer management and deal more effectively with an employer who is able to move around the globe at will, and play country off against country and plant against plant.

It’s a bit clunky (as most things run by union federations tend to be - it’s always a huge pain co-ordinating people and sites in a second language, and on a limited budget), but I think it’s a pretty good idea, and I’ll be fascinated to see how it goes. My main concern would be that the lack of polish (as opposed to Polish - which is catered for!) and easy explanation of how to work with it may turn off those people who aren’t bloggers already (ie. most people).

Good luck to all the GM bloggers, and let’s hope this is the first of many.

A quick word of warning to any Blogger-based bloggers looking to switch from the old Blogger service to new Blogger. Don’t do it!

It seems more than a little buggy, and I’ve suffered from broken feeds (so I don’t imagine anyone else will be reading this without the feed links from bloggers4labour and tigmoo.co.uk!), as well as losing a post yesterday that I’m too lazy to write out again
Give it a few weeks for them to iron out the wrinkles. I know it’s hard to ignore the pretty baubles of tags and trackbacks, but better safe than sorry!

UPDATE: Thanks heartily to Mr B4L who spotted the problem here - New Blogger is allergic to smart quotes it seems (the 6699’s that Microsoft likes to litter your docs with) so an old post was monkeying with the feed.