Inside LabourStart

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 —

• Have taken further steps to transfer the domain laborlists.org over to our web server at 1&1 Internet.  As you may recall, we were using this domain name on a US-based server to do our mailings until they decided that we were mailing out too much and we needed to migrate everything over to labourlists.org on 1&1.
• I recorded my weekly podcast on labour and technology, focussing on LabourStart and globalization.  It will go live tomorrow.
• I checked if our search function works on keywords and it does — at least in English. If you search on the term ‘FBU’ you’ll see a news story I posted today that has the term in the keywords field, but not in the title or source of the story.  It was reported to us at our conference that this may not work in some other languages, so we’re doing further checks.
• I looked into our RSS news wire in Russian, which has issues with character encoding.  Trying to fix this now.
• And as usual, I added a number of new subscribers to our mailing lists (people who have supported our campaigns), signed up some new correspondents, answered correspondence, and posted a dozen news stories on the site.

My fourth weekly podcast is on the subject of how we post labour news to LabourStart — comparing what we do to automated news aggregators like Google News.  I think correspondents will find this of interest.

Meanwhile, listenership of my podcasts is rising from week to week.  The first three podcasts had the following total number of listeners:

• Geocities and Facebook [11.6.10] – 555 listeners
• LabourStart’s Global Solidarity Conference [4.6.11] – 255 listeners
• Twitter [29.5.10] – 30 listeners

• We’ve launched a new campaign in support of striking Dis-Chem workers in South Africa.  A campaign in support of Mexican workers in Cananea may come online next week; we’re liaising with ICEM about this one.
• We now know for sure of over 100 people attending our conference — with two thirds of them having paid registration fees in advance.
• My latest Labour and Technology podcast is now online, here.

OK,  so it’s a first attempt and maybe the sound quality could be a little better, but please have a listen and let my know what you think — and share some tips about how to make it better.  Thanks.

I have to admit — I was inspired by a talk I heard at LabourTech Canada ten days ago on the subject of podcasting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it and have decided to attempt a short weekly show on the subject of labour and technology.  The first one may go live on Friday.

Obviously, I’ll link to these on Radio LabourStart.

I used to write regular columns on this subject for Industrial Worker, International Union Rights and Labour Research but have terminated all of these.  Perhaps podcasting is a better approach — certainly worth trying.

I still have ambitions to revive Radio LabourStart, initially as a source of links to existing podcasts and radio broadcasts, and later with our own content.

The first stage was to clean up the existing page and ensure that it now shows fresh content — this is now complete.

I’m still in Canada attending LabourTech where I participated yesterday in a session on podcasting and was inspired to consider doing this again.

Stay tuned.