Five alternatives to Facebook
My weekly podcast on Labour and Technology is now live, here.
My weekly podcast on Labour and Technology is now live, here.
The move over to a new server for our mailing lists, and the introduction of automated bounce processing, means a temporary dip in the number of subscribers. As a result, we’re down from 70,464 to 67,834. The list that grew the fastest was the Turkish one, which is now our 8th largest list. July also saw a dramatic fall in the number of unique visitors to the site, probably due to summer holidays (in the northern hemisphere).
Here are the totals with the changes since the end of June in brackets:
Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:
Sherlock Holmes once told Dr. Watson that “on general principles it is best that I should not leave the country” because “it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.”
I’m starting to feel the same way.
Forty-eight hours before my two-week vacation begins and we’re seeing a flood of new campaigns coming into LabourStart.
There are other requests in the pipeline as well. And comrades, it’s August — in the northern hemisphere, most trade unions barely function, as everyone is on holiday (at least in Europe).
Our collective absences from our desks in this period does seem to cause an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes, er, the bosses.
When LabourStart began having correspondents, they all knew English. In fact, at the beginning the only way to become a correspondent was by emailing me, and those emails were all in English. But now as we approach having 1,000 correspondents, we are beginning to run into some whose English is not very good, or non-existent. And we welcome those comrades to join us — which means that putting news onto LabourStart has to work in languages other than English.
We sorted this out a couple of years ago with French (thanks to Andy) and now we’ve had a request from Masha to do the same for Russian, which we’ve set up today and are now testing.
Basically, doing this involves two things —
We should be planning to do this for all the languages LabourStart appears in, which will allow us to recruit correspondents to work in a much wider range of languages.
At the moment we’re running seven campaigns at once — this is quite a lot for us — and they differ wildly in the number of messages sent. Here are the campaigns, the number of messages sent, and when they were launched — in order of popularity:
Google gave us some credit to lure us back to using their keyword-based advertising, so we took them up on it.
I ran an ad for UnionBook which was shown 2,363,293 times – though only a tiny fraction of that was searches. Google also shows ads when people view their emails, etc.
The ad was clicked on 626 times. The total cost (covered by Google’s credit) was US$137.55. The keywords which attracted the most interest in our ad were elgg (2.75% of those searching for elgg were interested in UnionBook) and trade union (1.35% of those clicked through).
UnionBook has picked up 95 new members since the beginning of July.
The ad read:
Union member?
Check out UnionBook, the social network for trade unionists.
www.unionbook.org
My latest podcast gives LabourStart as an example of how unions can use what’s happening in one country to pressure an employer in another.
Some of the things I’ve been working on today —
Yesterday I set up a conference followup group on UnionBook. This group will allow people to post links, documents, and so, to hold discussions — to do everything one would want to do after a conference. I’ve only informed some key people about it so far (8 of whom are now members), but plan to promote it more heavily later this week once we have all the email addresses of conference participants. Let’s use this group as a test to see if we can get UnionBook to be useful.
The Mexico PEMEX campaign has now been closed down with the consent of the ICEM. 4,318 messages were sent over 4 months. We have 6 remaining active campaigns all from within the last 3 months. In order of popularity they are:
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