Sep
30
2009
0

Labour Photo of the Year – the final hours …

203 trade unionists have signed up to our group on Flickr and have submitted 182 photos for judging.  In another 12 hours, we’ll stop the submissions and tomorrow we’ll ask the judges to select a shortlist of five, and then we’ll begin the voting.

Last year, this resulted in several positive things and they’re worth remembering:

  • We highlighted the great work of labour photographers – contributing in our own small way to encouraging our movement to generate its own content (photos, texts, etc), which is part of a broader project to reinvigorate the international trade union movement and its culture.
  • We showed off many great struggles, reminders to everyone that unions can be dynamic and exciting organizations engaged in great battles.
  • We raised LabourStart’s profile, meeting new people along the way, and we grew our mailing list by several hundred names.
  • We managed to get one great photo (last year’s winner) onto the front cover of Amnesty International’s trade union magazine in the UK, in the glossy full-colour magazine of the Education International, and elsewhere.  The photo was very widely distributed on the web.

It’s worth remembering that the idea for this competition came from Mac Urata of the ITF and has been run largely by Derek Blackadder; they both deserve our thanks.  I think this year is going to be another success and hope that we get even more votes cast than we did last year.

Written by ericlee in: Labour Photo of the Year,Uncategorized |
Sep
29
2009
1

LabourStart in Numbers [2]

On 23 August, just after our conference in Washington, I posted a report here with some numbers and I’d like to update this about once a month.  Here are today’s totals with the change since August (always increases) in brackets.  Most notable are the very large gains to our number of Twitter followers and our mailing lists (and this is a net gain, as we loose many subscribers each month due to bouncing email addresses):

  • Mailing lists – subscribers: 59,000 [+394]
  • UnionBook – members: 4,539 [+522]
  • Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,013 [+21]
  • Twitter – followers: 1,571 [+378]
  • Correspondents: 687 [+16]
  • Union group on Flickr: 491 [+32]
Written by ericlee in: Mailing list,Site traffic,Twitter,UnionBook |
Sep
14
2009
0

We tweet in 3 languages now

Kudos to Oskar and Andy for taking the initiative to set up Twitter feeds for LabourStart in Dutch and French.  You can see them here:

Our English language Twitter feed continues to grow — we picked up 14 new followers in the last 24 hours, and now stand at 1,526 followers.  Other correspondents are welcome to create their own feeds in other languages — let us know if you need any help.

Written by ericlee in: Twitter |
Sep
13
2009
0

Daily mailings and the best laid plans of mice and men

My plan to attempt daily mailings in English, each one with its own distinct topic, isn’t working — at least not today.  A half dozen things hit us all at once, and as I will not be at my desk most of this week (I’ll be in Geneva), it was important to get all this stuff out at once, today.

A top priority was the IUF’s current Pakistan campaign — we were asked to help.  And at the same time, we got reports from two of our partner organizations in Israel about campaigns we’ve promoted to our readers (and it’s hugely important that we update them when we have such news).  This week also sees the opening of the trade union congresses in the USA and UK, which we could not pass up, especially as they’ve both picked up on so many cutting-edge web ideas which we too want to promote.  And we wanted to continue with offering a new book every week, and actually delayed the launch of the Union Strategies for Hard Times book which should have gone out last week.

I could have tried to create four or five separate mailings and staggered them throughout the week, and somehow delayed the sending each day, but felt it would be simpler and easier this one time to do it this way.  But let’s hope that this doesn’t continue and that we can return to the idea of one topic, one mailing, each day.

Written by ericlee in: Campaigns,Mailing list |
Sep
11
2009
0

User IDs now appearing on all news stories

The problem I spotted a few days ago has now been resolved — I’ve looked over the last 550 or so news stories, one by one, and every single one now has a user ID.  Previously, as you know, some stories were appearing with no userID.

Written by ericlee in: News database |
Sep
10
2009
3

Improved display of news on UK, US, Aussie and Canadian pages

There are three priorities for news stories — top global stories, top national/language stories, and regular stories.  On the newly created news pages for the USA, UK, Canada and Australia, we would show first any top priority global stories from that country, then the top national/language ones, and then the regular ones.  The problem was the a top global story could sit there for weeks, not changing, as that country may not make the top global news stories that often.  Today, following up on requests from Warren Bone in the UK and Derek Blackadder in Canada, I’ve changed this — now the top stories (global and national/language) appear as one block, followed by the regular stories. Problem solved, I think.

Written by ericlee in: News database |
Sep
08
2009
0

Campaign guidelines

I’ve now posted our campaign guidelines here — so now, for the first time, we have made clear the rules and hope this will clear up any confusion.  Thanks to those of you who made comments on these.

Written by ericlee in: Campaigns |
Sep
07
2009
0

News database – problem solved?

I’ve noted that a number of recent news stories have been posted with the userID field blank.  This should not be happening.  I’ve made a couple of changes today to prevent this.  I tested it by adding a news story successfully.  If you run into any special problems when posting news stories, let me know urgently and I will fix this.

Written by ericlee in: News database |
Sep
05
2009
0

Campaigns coming …

It’s the end of summer (in the northern hemisphere), and Tuesday will be the first day back at work for many people.  (As well as the beginning of the school year for teachers and students.)  Expect a surge of LabourStart activity in the next few days including some online campaigns.  We’ve already been approached by no fewer than three Canadian unions to launch campaigns some of which may be Canadian only, others will be global.

This fits in neatly with our plan to experiment with daily, single-issue mass mailings (to our English list).  It also means that we cannot launch more than one campaign in a day, but nothing prevents us from launching three campaigns in three days.

We haven’t launched a new campaign since 26 July — six weeks ago, so we’re overdue …

Written by ericlee in: Campaigns |
Sep
04
2009
0

Labour Photo of the Year 2009

The contest begins.   Publicized to our English list and our Facebook group (via email), to Twitter and UnionBook.  Let’s hope for another great competition and thanks to Derek for the hard work he’s done and will do on this.

Written by ericlee in: Labour Photo of the Year |

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