Inside LabourStart

Within minutes of launch our Twitter petition in support of the Vale Inco workers became the most popular petition of the day on act.ly; 24 hours after launch we have just under 400 supporters.  At present, we’re the 7th most popular Twitter petition ever — and within a couple of hours, we should be the 4th.

Of course this is not success — success would be getting the company to back down and negotiate with the workers.

Nevertheless, we’ve obviously caught the imagination of some activists and stirred up some excitement.  Oh, and unlike some other campaigning tools, we’ve been able to use this to increase our campaigning capacity.  We’ve managed to recruit a not-inconsiderable number of new Twitter followers (now up to 1,819).