Inside LabourStart

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.

Bernie Lunzer from the Newspaper Guild:  Discussion on the crisis of journalism in the US and the attitude of journalist who are also trade unionists to the internet and its tools.

Facebook?  Twitter?  Our Twitter page is updated automatically every time a Top LS story is posted.  UnionBook:  Elgg allows us to build a Facebook-type site, an integrated social-networking tool.  Eric demonstrated the use of UnionBook and how it can be set to automatically update Twitter page.  Once the coding problems are solved, UnionBook should become much more useful.

UnionBook can be used for immediate and continuing news, such as updating the situation in South Korea’s auto plants recently.

Spammers’ access to UnionBook is a new problem that needs to be solved.

Are we duplicating our efforts?  Different networks reach different people.  Some people spend much time with Twitter who don’t necessarily check UnionBook.  One can receive UnionBook RSS feeds through email.

Keep in mind that if we had had this same discussion a few years ago, it would be in reference to MySpace and not Facebook.

Eric Lee’s  introduction.  Topics:  LS campaigns.  Australian Right to Work.  Written campaign guidelines.  “Super Campaigns” on enormously popular issues.  International relations.  Revive Portuguese LS.  Top Ten languages and  new editions of LS.  Spanish LS edition has doubled in the past year.  LS news service syndicated to hundreds of labor sites.  Regional meetings.  Take Unionbook to the next phase.  Blog aggregators.  Use Unionbook as a blog platform.  Multimedia:  Radio LS.  Labor film.  Photo of the day.  Sell more books online.  Success and lack of success of various projects.  Fund raising:  LS must be the cheapest project that the labor movement has ever known.  Next year’s conference.  Where should we be this coming Wednesday?  “To do” list for 2009-2010.  Most trade unions in US to not know about LS.  Welcome to Washington … let’s have a great conference!

Discussion:  More than half Australian labors use the LS news feed.  After lunch tomorrow, we will continue to discuss how to make ourselves better known to American unions in more detail.

Is is possible to get a feed for particular states?  Yes.

When labor-website writers create websites, about 70% request LS news feed.  Many American trade unionists do not have a sufficient degree of interest in labor projects not directly related to their own work.  Still, many trade unionist don’t appreciate the necessity of having websites.  Average trade unionists are different from “hard-core” organizers and activists.  LS is often approached by individuals who seem not to understand whether their particular concern is one that deserves international attention.

It is surprising that many union locals will allow a LS news feed on their sites.

Languages:  LS began only in English.  We add new languages quite often.  Other than English, LS’s most popular languages now are Finish and Norwegian.  We will not promote an “English only” agenda.  LS is now in 23 languages. What are languages would be useful and that have large constituencies?  Spanish news feed for Latino-speaking unions and locals would be useful.

Computer literacy and access are concerns, too.

See this …

http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/08/17/welcome-labourstart/#more-17584

… for James Park’s report on the LS conference.

LS podcasts?  Should we?  May not be sufficiently popular now.  LS and internet radio:  BBC once sent a reporter to see our London “studio.”  WINS still exists:  mostly American labor news.

Tula Connell introduced President Sweeney.  President Sweeney discussed the role LabourStart has provided for online labor news for the past ten years.  The labor movement hopes to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, hopes to pass health care legislation.  LabourStart has helped the labor movement to provide new models to reach out to trade unionists and the American labor movement hopes to use the internet and these new technologies to reach out to new members and to spread the word.

Here we are at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC.  About 30 of us are in the Samuel Gompers Room; we are introducing ourselves to one another.  Canadian Sr Correspondent Derek Blackadder is chairing this session.  We are expecting soon that President John Sweeney will arrive to address the conference.  In the meantime, it’s donuts, coffee and the like.  And we can buy union toys in the Union Shop near the building’s entrance.  There will be a reception starting at 5 pm at Teamsters headquarters.

Next week, LabourStart will be holding a small, invitation-only conference in Washington DC at the headquarters of the AFL-CIO.

The conference will take place over the course of three days and will involve participants from the USA. Canada, Trinidad & Tobago, Australia, India, Finland, Switzerland and the UK.

We’ll be discussing a broad range of subjects including LabourStart’s news and campaigns, blogging, social networks (including UnionBook), podcasting, labour film festivals, labour book sales, union jobs boards, and much more.

We’re hoping to blog about the conference as it happens here, and welcome all LabourStart correspondents to follow the blog and post your comments.  We promise to read out some of the comments at the event, as if you were there, so this is a wonderful opportunity for you to be involved — even if you can’t be in Washington.

LabourStartJobs.org is officially closed as of yesterday.  I’ve removed the main link from our English-language home page. If you spot a link anywhere else on our site, please let me know.

At our conference next month we can talk about what replaces it, but now we need to do an orderly shutdown of the existing service.

You can now add YouTube videos to your UnionBook pages – simply select My Videos from the menu on top.  I’ve just added the ITUC’s child hammer video on mine.  When you do this, it automatically posts an announcement to the front page of UnionBook.

As we all increasingly use various social networking tools, it would be great to have a way to be able to update our status or send out a short message to all of them – with just one click.  UnionBook now offers such a way.  If you correctly configure the Twitter plugin, when you post an entry to The Wire in your UnionBook account, it will automatically send out a tweet.  There’s a Twitter plugin for Facebook which now works and which turns your latest tweet into your Facebook status.  There’s also some really simple code that turns your latest tweet(s) into a list for your blog.

So this morning, for example, I posted the news that 1,000 more people have signed up for the South African campaign on LabourStart — I posted this as a Wire entry on UnionBook.  It automatically, and instantly, went out as a tweet, appeared as my Facebook status, and is on my blog.

Of course you can do all this without the UnionBook element as well, but what that means is you get even more visibility, because UnionBook Wire entries appear on the front page to those who are not yet signed in.

We should all be doing this and encouraging others to use UnionBook as the starting point for a fully-integrated system of status updates throughout one’s social networks.