When they tried to post the link (and later also short link site redirects to the site, and even posts discussing the site), they got a popup message saying the site had been reported and they weren’t able to share it. This persisted for some time before Facebook relented and let the site be shared by users.

This isn’t a new development – vexatious complaints to Facebook (or indeed pretty much any other commercial social network) can be ludicrously powerful. Facebook’s revenue per user is pretty minuscule, so their legions of users can only be serviced on the cheap. A few years back they only had around 100 customer service operatives to moderate tens of millions of active users’ content, and I imagine if the situation’s changed, it’s for the worse.

These beleaguered souls are kept busy removing the alleged paedophiles and terrorists that could seriously cause problems for the company, and so decisions over the rest of us are taken in the first instance by machines. This is how a machine mistook Derek for a spammer, and vexatious reports got Ms Wagstaff evicted over her ID. A few trolls or political opponents decide to badmouth a piece of content they don’t like, and it’s gone, regardless of how many good users it pisses off, as quite frankly it’s cheaper to lose a hundred users than spend 15 minutes on having a human resolve a dispute.

MIT’s Chris Peterson has a very interesting post on what he thinks are the mechanics behind this one, and it seems very plausible indeed. It looks like the Facebook auto-banning process has become a lot more efficient – Once it’s made a decision (right or wrong), it now works to tie off the possibility of that problem arising again. It makes sense – if something genuinely offended people, it’ll likely offend some other people the next time it gets posted. They might as well save their users the upset by pre-banning the content for subsequent shares.

I recently (rather slackly) moderated a large union event community on Facebook, and it’s the first time I’ve really had to deal with a severe case of troll-rot. People who seemingly have nothing to do all day but revisit a page to give the same right wing perspective on it over and over, even going to the huge effort of creating new identically presented accounts nearly as fast as you ban them. Clicking ‘report’ for the sake of it isn’t exactly hard to do, so once you add to this gibbering mass, the unscrupulous political (or employer) opponents of your campaign, activist content on Facebook is in a very vulnerable place.

I can’t really see a practical way out of this in the commerical framework. A community run network like Wikipedia can rely on a kind of user court to help weed out the vexatious complaints, but I doubt a commercial network like Facebook could get the goodwill from power users (though they did manage to get their translations done for them, so I concede I might be very wrong!) to undertake this kind of work unpaid. But the commercial relationship you enter into with Facebook is getting clearer and clearer all the time, as they strip out user-generated apps in favour of more passive, predictable and easily monetised content, and as their efforts to monetise your data by (generally rather clumsy) stealth never cease to surprise.

We pay Facebook by commoditising our identities and relationships for them. We can’t really complain (even if I’m in the first rank doing so…) when we come up against economic realities of their service – Their need to turn a profit and buy larger yachts simply trumps concerns about free speech for the millions who’ve over-invested their communications in the network.

So I can’t really see a way out of this (short of getting our own First Amendment this side of the pond). Facebook is shaky turf for activists, and getting shakier – as a mixture of the vulnerabilities of algorithms and the profit drive push us towards consuming cat photos and fan pages, and away from hard news and activism. It’s one more worrying facet of the Filter Bubble argument (I’m still shuddering from Eli Pariser’s compelling London lecture on his scary new book earlier this week). As Peterson puts it: “Think about the incredible, suffocating centralized power the Facebook filter represents to controversial opinions“.

And I guess in any case, the Wikipedia model works as the number of updates (and hence complaints) is much much smaller (still obviously colossal, but not on Facebook’s almost unimaginable scales). Will a Diaspora node manager (or UnionBook‘s dedicated volunteer crew) ultimately fare that much better on their smaller turf (and smaller resources) than Facebook’s thin blue line of customer service moderators?

Check out the neat-o widget here – though I think you’ll have to sit through a lot of people’s messages before you get to my one – it’s in there, honest!

I’ll be marching on 26th March for an alternative to the Coalition’s plans for fast and deep cuts to public spending. In fact, I’ll most likely be helping steward the event, but if you’re looking out for stewards’ tabards to find me, you might take a while. Event managers suggest a steward for every 50 marchers, which on a turnout over a hundred k will take 2,000 people volunteering to look out for their fellow marchers.

If you’re one such public spirited person, and think you look good in hi-vis, you can find out more about volunteering, and put your name in the ring over at the new March for the Alternative site.

For The Win meshes together the lives of people working in and around MMORPGS, the massively multiplayer online role-playing games which grow in size and value every year. Set about ten minutes into the future, it shows how these virtual worlds have developed virtual economies, with people who work in them, legally and illegally.

The illegal workers are ‘gold farmers’, people who play the games for hours on end to accrue virtual goods and virtual currency, which gets exchanged for the hard currency of western players who want to buy into a more enjoyable level of the game, without the hard work getting there.

The book focuses on gold farming kids in China and India, giving their back stories and describing their very unequal power relations with gold farm bosses, often connected to organised crime, and running dozens of players out of cyber cafes and sweatshops. Other kids are recruited to hunt down the gold farmers in-game – by the game owners themselves, or by rival gold farming gangs.

Thrown into the mix are union activists, seeking to organise virtual workers. The IWWWW (I kid you not, here come the ‘Webblies’!) are a radical international netroots union. They haunt the games, recruiting working players on all sides of the virtual economy.

Reading it, I was struck by the parallels with one of the labour movement’s key texts, Robert Tressel’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It gives a direct insight into the daily lives and perilous economic situation of a community on the edge – compelling vignettes from a huge cast of working people trapped on all sides by society and labour relations. Globalisation means that Doctorow’s community is physically atomised, but it’s no less connected than the workers and families of Tressel’s south coast town.

As with the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Doctorow’s book is a polemic in novel form, and needs chunks of reader-education to help it along. Much like Owen’s lunchtime lecture on the division of sandwiches, we get labour economist Ashok, explaining the economic background to the Webblies’ plans to gaming kids in a Mumbai suburb. There are also asides, where the narrator explains concepts directly. Key to understanding the book is this one, about how the internet crucially lowers transaction costs:

Whether you’re a revolutionary, a factory owner, or a little-league hockey organizer, there’s one factor you can’t afford to ignore: the Coase Cost.

Ronald Coase was an American economist who changed everything with a paper he published in 1937 called “The Theory of the Firm.” Coase’s paper argued that the real business of any organization was getting people organized. A religion is a system for organizing people to pray and give money to build churches and pay priests or ministers or rabbis; a shoe factory is a system for organizing people to make shoes. A revolutionary conspiracy is a system for organizing people to overthrow the government.

Organizing is a kind of tax on human activity. For every minute you spend doing stuff, you have to spend a few seconds making sure that you’re not getting ahead or behind or to one side of the other people you’re doing stuff with. The seconds you tithe to an organization is the Coase Cost, the tax on your work that you pay for the fact that we’re human beings and not ants or bees or some other species that manages to all march in unison by sheer instinct.

Oh, you can beat the Coase Cost: just stick to doing projects that you don’t need anyone else’s help with. Like, um…Tying your shoes? (Nope, not unless you’re braiding your own shoelaces). Toasting your own sandwich (not unless you gathered the wood for the fire and the wheat for the bread and the milk for the cheese on your own).

The fact is, everything you do is collaborative — somewhere out there, someone else had a hand in it. And part of the cost of what you’re doing is spent on making sure that you’re coordinating right, that the cheese gets to your fridge and that the electricity hums through its wires.

You can’t eliminate Coase costs, but you can lower it. There’s two ways of doing this: get better organizational techniques (say, “double-entry book-keeping,” an Earth-shattering 13th-century invention that is at the heart of every money-making organization in the world, from churches to corporations to governments), or get better technology.

…

The Coase Cost is the limit of your ability to be superhuman. If the Coase Cost of some activity is lower than the value that you’d get out of it, you can get some friends together and do it, transcend the limitations that nature has set on lone hairless monkeys and become a superhuman.

So it follows that high Coase costs make you less powerful and low Coase costs make you more powerful. What’s more, big institutions with a lot of money and power can overcome high Coase costs: a government can put 10,000 soldiers onto the battlefield with tanks and food and medics; you and your buddies cannot. So high Coase costs can limit your ability to be superhuman while leaving the rich and powerful in possession of super-powers that you could never attain.

And that’s the real reason the powerful fear open systems and networks. If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in the world, using the net, then we can all communicate with the same ease that’s standard for the high and mighty. If anyone can create and sell virtual wealth in a game, then we’re all in the same economic shoes as the multinational megacorps that start the games.

And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without her boss’s permission, then, brother, look out, because the Coase Cost of demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a lot cheaper. And the people who have the power aren’t going to sit still and let a bunch of grunts take it away from them.

This important point is where the book departs from the story arc of the RTP. Where Owen and Barrington were unable to effect real change to the inertia of their situation, the kids here have access to tools every bit as powerful as their employers’, and are able to escalate their ideas into action, talking to factory girls in their sweatshop dorms by internet radio, and spreading video evidence of actions and attacks in near real time.

The Webblies try to reach out to traditional unions, but don’t find enough understanding (of the technologies, the lives of youth, or the nature of globalisation on service work) to make links, and they find they’re left to support wildcat strikes by their virtual workers and many real world workers who support them. Whilst they can defend their members online, even their surveillance and survival skills can’t the halt brutal state repression and mob violence that ensue.

The human cost is huge and many characters meet with beatings, imprisonment or murder before the book is out, but by standing together across employers, job demarcations and across even continents, and by pooling their talents in an audacious plan to destabilise leading game economies, the workers win their chance to bargain for better work rights.

The book is written with teens in mind, and all the significant characters are of an age to make the UK’s average ‘young trade unionist’ reach for the botox. To those of us a generation or two downstream, these workers’ relationships to technology, globalisation and each other, may cause a few double takes, but this is what’s coming to the workforce all over the world. It strongly echoes JP Rangaswami‘s thoughts on Generation M (I wrote a bit about this and unions a while back, after seeing him speak about Generation M and their attitudes to work), and indeed, Rangaswami gets a namecheck in Doctorow’s thanks list.

I’d been concerned that the things that made Generation M so powerful, and such a challenge to established ways of working for their employers (loyalty to friends more than organisations, openness to collaboration and change, a willingness to vote with their feet, a dislike of compromise, and the skills and tools and skills to individually escalate their problems) might help individuals deal with personal injustices as they occurred, but mean they focused less on changing the systems that made those injustices occur. In short, if everyone thinks they can sort their problems themselves, and no-one is joining the union, the best will prosper, but who will still work to raise standards for everyone?

Doctorow weaves the same themes into a much more positive frame. Generation M have a strong desire for moral good. They’re naturally collaborative, don’t respect borders and boundaries, and given the power of the new networks for people to find each other, a temporary team of talented specialists can spring up almost organically whenever a problem needs to be addressed (much like a temporary MMORPG raiding party comes together, pooling talents to tackle a new challenge). They can come up with solutions more innovative than the forces ranged against them can start to imagine.

Go read it now, before the future gets here! Buy a copy (it’s in all bookshops, good or bad, from yesterday!), or take Doctorow up on his kind policy of making his work available in digital form for free under Creative Commons.

This will put a smile on your face for Thursday morning! Workers at San Francisco’s Westin St Francis Hotel have been locked in dispute with managment over their contract and healthcare provision, and things have gotten so bad, that they’ve come to the drastic step of calling for a boycott of their own employer until the situation improves.

Here are San Francisco LGBT activist group Havoq & Pride at Work staging a fantastic flashmob in the hotel lobby, aimed at highlighting the boycott to the thousands flocking to SF (and needing a hotel room) for the annual pride march.

This is really interesting stuff. It’s been picked up pretty widely in just 2 days now, and it will be fascinating to watch the stats and see how far it goes. My betting is that a union protest vid like this will have a far greater reach than a more traditional one of a march of thousands of trade unionists – but crucially far more viral potential with the audience it’s aimed at (pride visitors), rather than with those already converted.

All done with 30 people by the look of it. Admittedly 30 people including talented improvvers, musicians and video makers, and who met I guess for a couple of rehearsals, but still much less effort than putting on a march through town. It’s the flip of a union march: thousands (of whoever happens to be passing) see that on the street, but it never gets reported unless there’s a ruck. With this, only a couple of dozen see the actual stunt, but the edited up message goes online to thousands of more revelant eyeballs.

What this does need though is an idea that is this good. For every viral that works, many don’t. What will unions’ fail to win ratio look like? My guess is that this kind of thing will be the preserve of creative collectives like Pride At Work rather than the unions they support like (in this case) UNITE-HERE, for some time. Too often, unions produce something that we think is stretching our boundaries, but we fail to realise that what we think is externally focused is still only speaking to where we hope the audience are, not where they actually are (eg here’s a hotel boycott video from the same union that gets the message over well and helps the workers tell their story, but the SF one is getting the same traffic per half-hour that it’s had in 2 years) . That’ll change though with time, as good practice like this builds up to help us better understand the challenge.

And in the meantime – here’s how you find out which hotels to avoid for San Francisco Pride.

I guess there could be an element in some quarters of resistance to the intially strange idea of amateurs voluntarily taking on work that’s been traditionally done by paid staff in formal companies – the same issues we see wherever the internet is perceived to be pitting people’s leisure interests up against the work of professionals. More likey though is that it’s all a bit new to us. I don’t know many unionised coders myself, let alone union Open Source coders.

I think there’s a pretty good match to be made though. I remember listening to an amazing presentation on the structure of Mozilla a couple of years back, by Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker. She talked about the pressures of running a large organisation, but one with a staff mostly made of volunteers – people who gave their time for free to the projects, and in return got more fulfilment than they did from the dead end coding jobs they often did to fund their volunteering leisure time. Some of the workers are doing it professionally, some as a hobby, but they create something bigger by pooling both these interests. No-one could accuse Mozilla of turning in products worse than their commerical competitors – there are clearly good and bad providers on both sides of the divide.

What’s interesting to me is where value is held in the Open Source model. It’s not locked away in the intellectual property, with every product aimed at capturing a bigger market share than the costs the company paid for the work, and seeking to milk that as long as possible to maximise unearned gain. In Open Source, the code is at once ultimately valuable and financially valueless. Open Source companies generate their value through labour. You earn more by doing more jobs and by striving to do better work on each of them. Good companies need good staff on a permanent basis, not just armies of alienated temps to move in and out with the product cycle.

It’s hard to grasp – like every building firm getting a free loan of diggers and cranes whenever they want, because the act of using them actually improves them for the next company to borrow. But I think it might be a model unions could be looking at making more play of – putting a proper value for once on the labour and skills of our members and prospective members.

My standard response is that it all depends. The microblogging service Twitter is potentially attractive to unions as it’s something of a liberal and Labour ghetto, and it gets a lot of column inches for being flavour of the moment and making people look modern. However, Twitter is almost a platform in search of a utility, and different people/unions might get very different things out of it, or of course nothing at all, depending on how they naturally want to communicate.

Before deciding how you might use Twitter in your union, it’s worth thinking a bit about how your members and other people that you want to connect with will be using it themselves. Have a look at the profiles of some key people you’d want to communicate with – who they follow and who follows them. You can see patterns emerge that suggest the way they use Twitter, and how that might link in with you.

Skim-readers

Some people view Twitter as a reading list for whatever’s happening absolutely right this very moment. They follow people or organisations that interest them and when they log in, they see the latest updates – be they from Twitter celebrities, media outlets, or thought leaders in their sphere of interest.

It’s not comprehensive – they’ll never see more than a fraction of this 24/7 river of information that fits their interests, but that’s not the point. They’re more interested in the chance to get the very latest news, or tiny insights – updates too small or niche for normal news channels, but in a world of throwaway publishing, still of value to a specialist group.

The new Twitter lists feature has been really valuable to this group. They can split the people they follow into different topics – friends, profession, industry, etc – and follow just the relevant people when they want to be up to date on a particular topic.

Tweets will always be better received if you’re writing them manually, but for skim-readers, there’s also the possibility of automating your tweets, if you’ve something that you regularly produce in a standard format. Press releases might be an example here. Use a tool like Twitterfeed.com to take your website’s RSS feed of press releases (You do have one don’t you? Try open.dapper.net if you don’t), and send new items every hour to your Twitter account. You’ll get less readers than a properly managed feed, but at least some people who want to use Twitter for news alerts and who want your news will be interested in keeping tabs on you this way. If it takes off, then look at investing more time in writing original content for Twitter, but this is a fairly painless way to dip a toe in the water and see what happens.

If you’re publishing for skim-readers, try it out yourself first to see what others are getting out of it. If you’re maintaining a press room on Twitter for example, follow the journalists you’re interested in. If you’re publishing from a blog, follow other bloggers in your area. You’ll get a way of seeing the buzz amongst the people you’re interested in, and at the same time they’ll notice you in their follower lists and might be interested in checking out what you have to say too.

Beware. Being plugged into everything like this is stupidly addictive, and not always good news for nature’s procrastinators like me.

Networkers

Networkers build targeted lists like skim readers, but aim to use them to their professional advantage. They’ll follow people that they already know from their industry or interests, or influential people that they want to communicate with. They’ll use Twitter’s two-way features to follow up on other people’s tweets, making useful connections or contributing their own opinions.

Union officers with a particular specialism might like to work more in this way. An H&S practitioner could connect with other safety bodies, HR and medical sources and safety campaign groups, using retweets (where you forward on someone else’s tweet, with or without comment) to filter out interesting news from the wider community for your own readers.

It’s easy to get noticed if you’re bringing something useful to Twitter for those people who share your interests, and you may make useful new contacts you’d never normally come across, or be able to get useful responses from people who mightn’t answer (or even see) a cold email.

Chatterers

Some people prefer to use Twitter as a sort of time delay version of instant messaging, similar to Facebook status, but in a more extrovert series of interwoven conversations held in public. Chatterers will make much heavier use of replies (typing @ before someone’s username in a tweet draws their attention to it, whilst still keeping it public) and direct messages (DM – similar but hidden from anyone other than the sender and recipient).

Union branches might find this more useful, where the rep is more likely to be plugged in to members’ address books for regular conversation. Twitter gives you the ability to be contacted privately by members with concerns (if you and they already follow each other), or possibly a means for you to quickly solicit feedback on an issue.

It’s always good to make yourself open to members to communicate in the ways in which they’re most comfortable communicating – and for many this is now Twitter. The downside is that people might expect DM responses even more quickly than they’d get from email, and you’d end up putting in a lot of effort for only a smallish group of members who want to communicate that way.

Another issue to bear in mind is that anyone (such as an employer) could see all the people following the union, which some people might be reluctant to reveal, or worse might end up getting people into trouble.

Social searchers

Some people like to use Twitter to find out what the buzz is about a topic at any point, without necessarily building their own lists or followerships. They watch for and follow trending topics (Twitter lists the most popular topics at any one point for different countries) and hashtags (a convention in Twitter where you add a # in front of a word as a way of standardising keywords, so people can more easily find your tweet in searches – eg #trafigura).

Or they might use ‘social search’ engines like Topsy.com to find not the most relevant pages overall for a subject (as a traditional engine would provide) but the most relevant right now. Even the mainstream search engines like Google are moving towards factoring in this kind of social search (see Google’s “latest results” box).

A union can make use of this technique by tweeting about topical news they may have, but first searching to see if other people talking about the issue are using a hashtag, and including that too. This will bring extra people to your tweets – only a few, but they’re guaranteed to be interested in the issue you’re talking about, which counts for a lot.

If you’re engaged in a campaign or dispute and will be sending a stream of tweets on it, invent your own hashtag for it. That way you can monitor more easily what others are saying about the issue (if the hashtag spreads), and find potential allies, as well as making sure your own tweets are all front and centre for anyone following the tag.

If you can co-ordinate supporters to all use the same hashtag, you might notice your issue trending, and you’ll get a lot of interest. Try to make clear how people can translate that interest into some kind of action. The flip side to trending of course is that it lasts for hardly any time at all before some celebrity does something funny, or someone invents a new 140 chars meme to spread, and that displaces you from the charts.

Hecklers

Twitter’s wide-open nature makes it an ideal space for people who want to say something publicly. Addressing a message @ someone – be they a union, individual or campaign target – lets everyone else see what was said. If you start an organisational Twitter account, you’ll get people who disapprove of particular decisions/personalities/whatever sending you slightly narky messages that they don’t really want you to respond to – It’s more like a form of cyber-heckling.

Don’t lose sleep about engaging with anything you find offensive – it’s very easy to get wound up about criticism appearing on the web, as it’s there for ever, but in Twitter’s case, people move on after about fifteen minutes. Most people aren’t expecting a reply, they’re just venting, but will be happy to get one. The handy thing about being so restricted in what you can write is that people don’t expect you to reply with volumes. It doesn’t take a long time for any organisation that issues press releases to find a web link to a statement that shows you do care about their issue (or gives an honest reasoning for why you disagree), and whilst it’s unlikely to sway them on the issue, many will appreciate that you at least took the time to respond.

Of course, all this applies to messages you yourself send out to public targets too. You can tie a union’s message to a target’s Twitter account by sending it @ them, but for more popular companies, it will be tomorrow’s chip paper within minutes.

An interesting Twitter application for unions is the Twitter petition – Act.ly has a great tool that lets you petition Twitter users. You write a short demand (actually pretty tricky!) and it sends from your account, tracking a page of people who retweet it. This results in lots of @ messages to the target, making sure they notice it. They have the opportunity to reply, and have that reply appended to the petition on Act.ly. Numbers taking these petitions are low so far, but given the low number of @ messages that most companies will be receiving compared to emails, it may be noticed more than a low volume email action, and has the benefit of every signature bringing a viral effect.

You can reflect on-side heckler activity in other ways too. A Twitterfall is a stream of content published in real time by other users about your issue – it can be a nice web feature to show just how often people are interacting with your ideas. Just make sure you’re not opening yourself up to a spot of griefing. There are Tweet moderating services out there – betas of Tweetriver and Tidytweet are both nice tools – which might sacrifice speed, but will spare your blushes.

Obsessives

And of course there are a large number of people who want to use Twitter for things precisely because they can. The kind of people who will wrestle with an iPhone app for 30 minutes to order a pizza, because it’s more fun than ringing up in 2 minutes. These people love Twitter’s extensibility, and are the reason there are so many thousands of lovingly coded apps out there that actually do very little other than make you think “that’s pretty neat”. When you’re doing something clever with Twitter – run it past the “pretty neat” test to see if anyone in the real world might use it.

Some parting thoughts. In practical terms, I’d also recommend you use a Twitter client rather than the Twitter website itself. I like Hootsuite.com myself. And of course If you’re posting URLs to Twitter, do so with a URL shortener (otherwise they take a lot out of 140 chars) – ideally one like bit.ly that tracks clickthroughs so you can see if your tweets are being picked up and acted upon, or if you’re just talking to an empty room.

Twitter is low risk. If it doesn’t work out for you, just scrap it. You didn’t pay anything for it or need to drastically alter your comms strategy to make use of it, and most of your followers don’t really expect anything of you – they’re used to new people coming every day, and just as many old people leaving. Experiment with it – there are probably many other types of Twitter users out there amongst your membership or stakeholders, and actually putting a toe in the water may show you for the first time how you could be go about communicating with them.

So when I was asked to do an essay on union activists and social media for US academic journal WorkingUSA, I was a bit panicked. Luckily I managed to work it out by developing a presentation on many of the themes I wanted to cover, so I could test it out with different audiences first. The final essay “Connecting Activists” is now published in the current issue of WorkingUSA – go buy/loan a copy now!

I have to admit to finding academic journals a bit odd. You get asked to write something many months before it appears, as there’s a pretty complicated process to go through, with every submission approved and then final articles reviewed by the editorial board (who are all rather busy people already). The final article (with properly referenced footnotes and reading) is then included in a magazine that has a limited circulation of specialists, who pay quite a bit to subscribe online and in print, their institutionally paid subs covering the not inconsiderable expenses of all that work.

So you end up with something that can’t be searched or shared to help make new connections with other people who might find it useful, has a lot of extra background baggage nobody’s going to check, and in any case is already a bit out of date by the time anyone does see it. The social media activist approach suits me much better – occasional gems hidden in a huge pile of throwaway ideas, available to people who never knew it was what they were looking for.

I made the mistake of mentioning to my three-degreed wife that maybe academia should maybe give up on journals and just start some blogs instead to speed things up, and to her my thoughts sounded much more wacky than established academia sounded to me. So if you build your own argument on something, how do you know it’s a constant if the source might get commented/updated/deleted? How will people trace it back to see if what you’re doing stands up? How much of your own time do you need to invest to work out whether something is kosher, if it isn’t already peer-reviewed? And how are you going to ever measure anything properly to see if you were right or not? Well, I consider myself told, ho hum, and I need to make a bit more of an effort to engage with this kind of learning.

I’m giving a presentation on this theme (social media and union activism) later via web conference, so had to nip out and buy a webcam earlier. Whatever other faults Microsoft may have in their webcams, they make up for it by thinking of book-resistant me, with a nice big day-glo green cover over the USB lead, telling me to for chrissakes see the quickstart and install the software before just cracking on and plugging the thing in as I was about to do and screw up my system. So, by rather laboured analogy, sometimes a more ‘activist’ approach to networking mightn’t be the best idea, and a bit of distance and academic scrutiny could do us the world of good.

The first I saw was Unite AGS Tony Burke, who has started adding regular guest posts to the Print Week blog, as a sub-blog called Unite Viewpoint. Tony is in charge of the Unite print workers’ section, and this is a great fit – getting the union’s comment right into a paper which will be closely followed by Tony’s members, and much more importantly by workers in the industry who aren’t yet members of the union.

And thanks to a helpful comment she left on ToUChstone blog, I recently noticed UNISON head of local government Heather Wakefield’s own blog as part of Public Finance magazine’s group blog. She has written some great articles that will be of a lot of interest to local government administration, positioning her as a recognisable expert with many potential members and other key people around her sector. UCU officer Stephen Court has also joined her on PF blog with a monthly article which gets combined into the wider blog.

The trade press are busily trying to build their online presence, and for many publications, this means instituting a blog as a way of adding more topical content and getting more direct contact with their readership through commenting. Offering help with this by contributing regular articles from the union’s unique perspective should be pretty attractive prospect to them as well as to you (don’t worry it’s not taking union journalists’ jobs. There’s no column inch limit to a blog, and in the current miserable climate for the media, helping boost the publication’s revenue very slightly through online ads is doing them a favour!).

Unions have written bylines for the trade press for many years, and it could be seen as a bit of a climb down to write specifically for a blog, which will (at least for the moment) have a smaller readership than the print magazine itself. I think you need to try both though. You can get more regular content in a blog format – you’ll only be allowed a magazine byline every now and then, and certainly not more often than the magazine is published – plus you’ll be stored on the site and searchable for much much longer. The implicit endorsement of the union as a serious player through inclusion on the magazine’s site could be valuable in impressing potential members that the union is a good step to professional development.

The same might hold for local media, where a Trades Council or union regional official might be a great addition to the blog team of that paper’s own blog – getting the union better known in the community.

If the blog you write for has an individual feed (as both these examples do), you could even integrate it onto the union’s site, Twitter feed or other channels in some way – building even more positive links with that publication, and a better working relationship for the other ways they cover your union.

So for those who don’t know whether they should set up a blog for their union at the moment, why not consider borrowing one instead?

The latest experiment is Union Newswire. It collates and republishes links to union press releases from 19 UK organisations. The idea is to make a one-stop shop for journalists, bloggers or students following developments in unions. Rather than remember to check 19 sites, it gives you a choice of ways to stay up to date with the news you need from each of them, depending on how you want to work – web, email, RSS or Twitter.

Don’t poke it too hard, as it will likely fall over though! Whilst I’ve had it running in secret for a few months, I only got around to working out one of the bugs today, that was causing problems for the shared RSS feed, and hence preventing Twitter syndication too. It’s still running on the web 2.0 equivalent of sticky tape and bluetack, but at least every function now seems to be working for at least some of the time.

It’s powered mainly by WordPress, using the excellent FeedWordpress plugin. Many unions provide a press release feed on their site, but as some don’t, I had to use the brilliant (but slightly temperamental) service Dapper to scrape feeds from press office pages. The feeds are tidied where needed in Yahoo Pipes or Feedburner, and all brought together. WordPress’ Subscribe2 plugin handles email digests, and Twitterfeed helps publish it on to Twitter.

So barring some contributions to the tip jars of plugin devlopers, a domain, and a few bob for shared web hosting, it’s not cost anything for the technology. A bit of fairly painless work to set it up and it should now chug along happily on its own (until someone changes the way their feed works). It’s a similar idea with my spare-time union blog aggregator TIGMOO.co.uk, which monitors around 120 union related blog feeds, to make a regularly changing home page with next to no day to day maintenance.

So far so good, but you may be forgiven for thinking that press release or blog aggregators are not something uniquely useful to unions. That’s right enough, but being able to take feeds, make feeds of things that don’t have feeds yet, and mash them up into a portal could have much more application.

The more obsessive may have noticed one of my half-finished hobby projects, LaborGeek.org. Unlike Union Newswire, which matches a bigger set of like for like items to add its value, LaborGeek matches disparate items around a theme. Using the same technologies, it mixes up blog posts, forum topics, shared bookmarks and keyword news searches, to make an ecclectic reading list, (loosely) themed around unions and Information Communications Technology. There’s now a place to follow this rather niche topic that means it doesn’t matter if you take your eye off any of the individual resources involved.

I think there are opportunities to become the place which provides the space for discussion around a certain topic (and also for those topics to be bigger than the nerdy ones that interest me…).

Suppose a union is trying to organise a new sector (or maybe a GUF wants to push for an agreement with a multi-national employer, or a union campaigner wants to build support around a broad industrial issue). If a union could make a rapidly updated portal, which combines the latest news on that sector from multiple sources, along with interesting perspectives from some industry-related blogs, useful web links, and relevant news specifically from that union, and parcel the whole thing up in a way that’s easy to follow and share (RSS, Twitter & Facebook syndication and so on), it could help them to ‘own’ that issue, and be the natural place for people to turn to.

Now, unions have something of a constraint when it comes to the web, which is that they mostly don’t have a lot of cash or staff available to maintain sites and tools, certainly not rapidly updated and comprehensive portals. Which is where the aggregator comes in. Choose your sources well and set it running, and it can act as a magnet around your chosen issue, with much less human editorial input that a traditional magazine type site.

The sources will like it as it will increase their traffic, and the users will value the wider community it forms around the issue. The union gets to have this activity happening on its own turf, where it can present its own ideas to a relevant and engaged audience. What’s not to like?

And, inspired by the IBEW social media organising vid, I thought I’d try out Prezi.com’s shiny new beta embed feature to show a presentation on the same lines that I did for UNI Global Union a few months ago.

BTW, I think Prezi has some good potential for union organisers too – a fair sight more compelling than the death-by-Powerpoint you get at many union meetings, and easy for people to use outside the context of the meeting.