May
24
2009
0

Share this link: Now works with social bookmarking sites

In addition to Facebook, our readers can now share campaigns on Digg, Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon.  I’ve tested this on Digg, where I have an account, but not on the others.  Shouldn’t be a problem, but if others want to test, this is fine.  If you have other social networks or social bookmarking sites we should also offer (MySpace and Twitter strike me as important) let’s add these as well.

I’ll mention this in our Thursday mailing next week – let’s hope this helps make some of our campaigns go viral.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
22
2009
2

Share this link on Facebook

I’ve just added some code that appears on every campaign now and allows our readers with a single click to share the campaign link on Facebook.  I tested it and it works.  Obviously we won’t stop here — like the BBC, we’ll allow this to be used for Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious and other social networking/bookmarking websites.  I strongly encourage each of you to visit our campaigns and click on the link to add to Facebook (make sure you’re logged into Facebook first).

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
22
2009
0

Iran campaign closed down; 26 June solidarity event

Three months after launching our most recent Iran campaign, we’re suspending it — after consulting with our friends at the International Alliance in Solidarity with the Workers of Iran.  We expect to soon have an update from them on the situation.  Meanwhile, the ITUC and several GUFs have issued a call for a world-wide day of action on 26 June in support of Iranian workers.  We’ve been involved in setting up the website for this event, and have created a special Iranian labour newswire for it.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
20
2009
0

Promoting Steve Early’s new book, Embedded with Organized Labor

Steve Early’s new book, which comes out this week, is a terrific collection of articles and essays written by a US trade union activist.  I read it almost in one sitting – it was that good.  And it’s very important, discussing a lot the key issues facing unions not only in the US.  Steve and I have had an email correspondence for several years and I’m delighted that we’re getting the chance to market his book through his publisher, Monthly Review Press.  If we push hard the book can sell quite a few copies and this could also be of substantial benefit to LabourStart.

I’ve published an interview with Steve, created a special page where you can order copies, and have made the interview a top news story on LabourStart.  We’ll also promote as usual through Facebook, UnionBook and Twitter.

Written by admin in: Publications |
May
19
2009
0

Updates: campaigns, bookshop, correspondents

We’ve launched a new campaign in support of Compass workers in Algeria, at the request of an independent union there.  It’s now in English and French and the other langauge translators have been requested to get this up in additional languages as well.

This is in addition to the campaign launched in support of PSI, to pressure the Puerto Rican government.

Tomorrow I make a presentation a fringe meeting at the annual conference of PCS, Britain’s civil servants union, on the subject of online campaigning.

I’ve been adding a default language and country to many more correspondents accounts – so far, 181 correspondents have default languages set up.  I wrote a special program to show me which languages and countries a correspondent typically posts to, in order to help decide this.

We’ll be doing a second author interview for Labour’s Online Bookstore this week, to tie in with the promotion of Steve Early’s excellent new book, which we’re selling directly through the publisher.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,News database,Publications |
May
15
2009
1

33 hours after a mass mailing

We did a mailing to our English list 33 hours ago, reaching some 52,000 subscribers.  The results are interesting, I think:

  • Only 559 signed up to the IUF campaign – I think in part because there have been several IUF Pakistan campaigns and there’s real “campaign fatigue” and possibly confusion about these.
  • Only 22 more people signed up to UnionBook, so we didn’t get that much closer to an interim goal of 3,000 verified users.  This may be because we’ve pitched UnionBook many times before and did not come up with a new and compelling reason to sign up this time.
  • On the other hand, our news about a revived Twitter feed got 23 people to subscribe, so we now have over 1,000 Twitter followers.
  • Finally, book sales were actually not bad at all — even without an author interview this time, we managed to get 12 orders totalling $421.35 (our share is $42.13 of that).
Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
May
13
2009
0

In brief …

  • We’ve successfully upgraded our web hosting account with 1&1 Internet and now have 10 more MySQL databases we can fill up.
  • Some changes to Twitter: we’ve taken some ideas from our Dutch edition, and have changed our Twitter icon from a red fist to a coffee cup, our background from a Korean photo to white, and the link on our home page to a very cute Twittering bird – which now links directly to our Twitter feed, where we have 992 followers.
  • A lot more people have been invited to our conference and the list of those attending or invited is updated every day.
  • The fundraising concert held in Sheffield earlier this month was not a huge success – but £50 was raised for LabourStart.
  • Our French edition is now using an interesting Flickr box to display the photo of the day.
  • Our photo of the year continues to appear in print — I just sent a packet containing several recent examples to the photographer.
  • Two upcoming events: on 20.5 I’ll be doing a fringe meeting at the PCS union conference in Brighton on the subject of online campaigning.  The following week, I’m in Brussels doing a communicators event for the Education International on the same subject.
May
13
2009
0

Update on Labour’s Online Bookstore

See this article I was asked to write for the Talking Union blog.

Written by admin in: Publications |
May
07
2009
1

UnionBook – good news, bad news

The good news is that I’m now devoting myself to beginning to fix as many of the genuine problems we’re having as I can.  The bad news is that the programmer we were employing to do this for us has no time to do it.  So it’s back to learning how to deal with Elgg.  Yes, it would be great if some volunteers with PHP experience would step forward to help, but that hasn’t happened so far and is unlikely to be the case, but I might ask in a future mailing to UnionBook users.  I’ll update you here meanwhile as I cross things off the todo list.

Done:

  1. You can now search for groups – I explain how in a blog posting and in the Help page.  I will probably also point this out in our next mailing to UnionBook users.
  2. I’ve written a script that allows an owner of a group (actually, at the moment, anyone) to email all members of a group.  Still working on the security, but in principle we now have a very powerful tool.  I’ve just sent out the first test mailing now.
Written by admin in: UnionBook |
May
07
2009
0

Back to the future: Automatic updates to our Twitter feed

Senior correspondent Oskar van Rijswijk came up with a great idea: Use Twitterfeed to automate tweets from LabourStart.  I set it up and it works.

Throughout the day, Twitter is being updated with three things from LabourStart:

  • Our online campaigns
  • Our global newswire in English
  • Our latest book of the week

Right now, it works like a charm – you can see the results here.  Very cool.

Written by admin in: Newswires |

Powered by WordPress | Aeros Theme | TheBuckmaker.com WordPress Themes