Jul
06
2009
0

LabourStart Jobs – R.I.P.

LabourStartJobs.org is officially closed as of yesterday.  I’ve removed the main link from our English-language home page. If you spot a link anywhere else on our site, please let me know.

At our conference next month we can talk about what replaces it, but now we need to do an orderly shutdown of the existing service.

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
Jul
03
2009
0

YouTube videos on UnionBook

You can now add YouTube videos to your UnionBook pages – simply select My Videos from the menu on top.  I’ve just added the ITUC’s child hammer video on mine.  When you do this, it automatically posts an announcement to the front page of UnionBook.

Written by admin in: UnionBook |
Jul
03
2009
0

One-click status updates – now working

As we all increasingly use various social networking tools, it would be great to have a way to be able to update our status or send out a short message to all of them – with just one click.  UnionBook now offers such a way.  If you correctly configure the Twitter plugin, when you post an entry to The Wire in your UnionBook account, it will automatically send out a tweet.  There’s a Twitter plugin for Facebook which now works and which turns your latest tweet into your Facebook status.  There’s also some really simple code that turns your latest tweet(s) into a list for your blog.

So this morning, for example, I posted the news that 1,000 more people have signed up for the South African campaign on LabourStart — I posted this as a Wire entry on UnionBook.  It automatically, and instantly, went out as a tweet, appeared as my Facebook status, and is on my blog.

Of course you can do all this without the UnionBook element as well, but what that means is you get even more visibility, because UnionBook Wire entries appear on the front page to those who are not yet signed in.

We should all be doing this and encouraging others to use UnionBook as the starting point for a fully-integrated system of status updates throughout one’s social networks.

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
Jul
01
2009
0

Some updates from June

Campaigns: Launched a campaign in support of workers at Paul Yu in the Philippines at the request of the Labor Party there (now with 1,209 supporters, in 7 langauges).  Received a request for assistance raising money for strikers from the IMF and am currently following through on this.   Launched campaign in support of striking Stella D’oro workers in New York at the request of the BCTGM, via the IUF (930 supporters in 7 languages).  Launched a campaign in support of South African union shop stewards suspended for calling safety strikes, at the request of the ICEM (with 445 supporters in 3 languages; will be publicized to our list tomorrow).

UnionBook: Integrated The Wire with Twitter, so posts to one are automatically posted to the other.  Continued work on getting Twitter integrated with Facebook as well so that this can be an easy and elegant way to update one’s status across a number of social networks — starting with a post to UnionBook.  Continued work on the mail-to-groups feature which works, but needs to be fully secured against spammers.Added the ability to include any RSS feed, including your blog, in your home page and profile.  There are now 3,147 registered users who have validated their accounts.

Languages: Continued work on problems with conversion of upper case Norwegian characters in our RSS feed — they don’t convert from Unicode to the old Western European character set known as iso-8859-1.  Fixed all the pages displaying our newswires so that the characters now render correctly.

Regional RSS newswires: Sorted out the Caribbean one.

LabourStart Canada: Sorted out ca.labourstart.org to work like oz.labourstart.org.

Global labour calendar: Did quite a bit of work getting this ready for prime time.

Books of the week: Promoted several from UCS including a book of labour quotations and a biography of Eugene V. Debs in June. In this quarter (April – June), 194 orders for books were placed through our UCS affiliated bookshop with sales totalling $7,779 (our share of that, $778, equals £475).  In the previous quarter, only 9 orders had been placed and we sold $746 worth of books (our share of that, $74.60, equals £45).  This is a 1000% increase due to the promotion of books of the week most weeks.  In the same quarter, we also sold 41 copies of Steve Early’s book directly through the publisher, for a total of $1,031.  Our share of that was was $294 (£179).  So our total book sales for the quarter is probably a record for us — $8,810.

Our Twitter feed: Now part of the union Twibe.  We currently have 1,127 followers and automatically post all top news headlines, each new campaign as it is launched, and our book of the week.

August conference: Sorted out with the AFL-CIO a hotel people can stay in at a decent price.  Created a group in Gmail for all those registered so far.  Arranged housing with local trade unionists for some of us.  Details on who is attending and the agenda so far on featured on the conference blog — click on the tab above.

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |

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