Social networks and microblogging / II
Continuing discussion from morning. Walk through some of the features of UnionBook.
Blogs and blog aggregators: Stuart Elliott speaks about Talking Union, the DSA labor blog … and pineapples. Some are linking LS to their blog pages.
www.unionblogs.ca
www.tigmoo.co.uk
laborgeeks.com
There are an increasing number of bloggers in US, who have no specific union backing, who post material on trade union issues. Blog aggregators help build a sense of community among bloggers. They have also created increasing interest in the labor movement, at least in Canada. There seem not to be prominent blog aggregators involving union issues in the US.
5 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Just checked out laborgeeks.com which seems to be selling labour rather than being about labour.
But you could look at Blogger4Labour which can be found, surprising, at:
http://www.bloggers4labour.org
Apart from human intervention, how does an aggregator know whether a blog is pro or anti-union?
Hi Dave,
Wrong URL (unless you want furniture shifting…) – it’s at http://www.laborgeek.org and is about unions using ICTs and other issues where labor and tech collide. I run it and another (UK union blogs at http://www.tigmoo.co.uk ) in my spare time, and to answer Andy’s point yes, entirely.
The Tigmoo one syndicates 120 UK blogs that identify themselves as being in significant part about labor issues. Obviously not all the stories are labor related, as the bloggers cover any number of tangents. The accuracy could be improved a lot by either restricting the feeds to ones based on a “union” keyword (not available to all systems) or by admin moderating. However, if I were to moderate all posts, they’d go up a day or two late at times, which would be no good for the blogs. So like bloggers4labour (on which Tigmoo is modeled), there’s a lot of chaff in the wheat, but that’s the best balance.
Laborgeek is more experimental. It has an even lower strike rate than tigmoo as as well as blogs relevant to the subject, it also draws from automatic google search strings, forum postings, and user contributed del.icio.us bookmarks (basically any source I can kludge an rss feed out of). This can let any old crud in frankly, but might occasionally throw up a useful tidbit or two. As the site is aimed to be more of a sandbox and reading list for my own use (to be honest!), I’m not so fussed about this.
this page might help with a bit more explanation of how unions might use aggregators meaningfully: http://www.laborgeek.org/the-technology/
cheers, John
And whilst you’re there, make sure to tell that Dondley (Hi Steve, hope you’re enjoying the conference!) to knock up an aggregator for US labor blogs when he gets back. It’s out of the box Drupal, 10 mins work for a Drupal wiz like him 😉
Hi John
Yeah, I guessed it was wrong – I just copied what was on the report. I doh have no furniture to shift so I going to leave dem alone.