johninnit

We’ve seen a whole bunch more union related blogs over the last year, at all levels of the movement (check out the lists at TIGMOO.co.uk for many of them). But one thing I’ve noticed has impressed me in particular, and that’s the first attempts at cleverly using other people’s blogs to talk to members. I’m not talking about the Gen Sec posts that pop up on Comment Is Free every now and then, or the more mainstream political blogs, but something much closer to unions’ membership – the online trade press. (more…)

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. (more…)

Just finished compiling this year’s TIGMOO.co.uk Guide to Union Blogging, just in time for Congress 2009. If you saw last year’s, you’ll know what to expect from it. I’ve spent a few hours adding up all the posts, comments, Alexa traffic estimates and Google inbound links, and predicted a top 25 blogs from the 120 odd on the network.

Who has the top spot this year? I can tell you that this here blog has slumped down the rankings a few places (sob), and that a third of the top 25 are new entries since last year, so there’s a lot to be looking out for.

After my post last night on the enigma that is Labourist (the fan site / attack site / alternative model demo of Derek Draper’s LabourList),  I got a nice and very full comment (at least purporting to come) from the person/people behind the site, taking issue with my cynicism and offering counterpoints to a lot of what I’d said. I started writing a reply but it go so long, I thought I’d stick it here instead…

Thanks for the considered reply. You’ll forgive me for remaining sceptical of your honest intentions for a while yet though. As you won’t tell me who you are, I have to go on what I can surmise from limited evidence – which doesn’t yet give me cause to believe you. There are six main stumbling blocks for me: (more…)

Last week was a cheery one for Labour techies, with Derek Draper starting up what I think is going to be a very useful part of the jigsaw for the left blogohemisphere in the UK, LabourList.org. So enthused was the party by this project that none other than Lord (né Peter) Mandelson threw caution to the wind and set off exploring Second Life.

Well, one week on and the project’s had a bit of a double pwnage from political opponents. The Daily Mail pranked Mandelson’s virtual life by making a clone avatar and hanging about SL, behaving inappropriately. They missed the more interesting points of SL by a couple of virtual miles, but then I guess nobody ever read the Mail for sci/tech (or much beyond hell-in-a-handcart whingefests and cringeworthy reader offers).

More interesting is the treatment LabourList itself has received. A shady bunch of activists have set up a duplicate at the similarly titled Labourist.org. It’s posing as a principled objection, but I think is more likely a neat spoiler. (more…)

A fun seminar at the TUC the other week, on how unions might be able to use blogging to influence public policy debate. Great economic policy blog case studies and tips from Tom of Labour and Capital and Richard of Tax Research, and a side order of demagoguic simplification from Paul Never Trust a Hippy, who very thoughtfully wrote up some well-worth-a-peek notes to share around.

I got my own 5 min waffle in, and this is pretty much what I said. Blogging is a technology (basically the combination of 3 ideas: simple and freely available publishing, loose networks and conversation through comments and links, and simple republishing and syndication via RSS to help people follow a blog),  which lends itself very well to six scenarios that unions might well find themselves in.

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There are now a whopping 100 UK trade union related blogs in the TIGMOO.co.uk blog directory, so I thought I’d do a little analysis of them, and see what it tells us about the state of union blogging. (more…)

The guy in the photo is called Ze Preto (or rather that’s his nickname, it means Joe Black, which is something along the lines of Joe Blogs), and he lives on a subsistence farmstead a very bumpy half hour drive outside the inland market town of Ouricuri in Pernambuco, in North East Brazil.

I met Ze and his family in 2000, whilst I was working for the development charity Oxfam. They were one of the success stories of a project I was visiting, which was helping landless farmers to live a more secure life in the inhospitable climate of the Sertão – the semi-arid region, where long annual droughts can kill off most crops. The project, called Caatinga after the hardy scrub plants of the region, was helping people to implement sustainable technologies like huge underground water butts, which filled in the rainy season and stored vital irrigation and drinking water the rest of the year. (more…)

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. (more…)