Inside LabourStart

As the Teamsters have stopped focussing on The Gap as part of their Oak Harbor campaign — they’ve moved on to other companies — we’ve agreed to shut down our campaign after about 6 weeks online.  We’ll announce this in today’s mass mailing.

We’ve also asked the UE — which has been quite busy this week — about closing down the Janos, Mexico campaign which was launched in August.  We’ve had no updates at all from them, and fewer than 1,000 messages sent.

Not sure if anyone noticed, but our TV page hadn’t been updating for the last 3 1/2 months …

Now fixed.

We actually set something up a few years ago – ahead of our time, as usual – but didn’t promote it and didn’t sustain it.  It’s time to do this right.

Have a look at http://www.labourstart.org/m .  Best to view this in your mobile phone or PDA.

Here is how it will look in an iPhone:

Later today you’ll be able to reach this at http://m.labourstart.org

Later this week, I’ll begin sorting out versions in the other languages – but for now this works in English, and is live.

It’s that time of year again.

As we did last year, this year we’ll invite all our readers to submit their nominations for sites and our correspondents will choose which sites make the short-list.

Then we’ll invite all our readers to vote to choose the 2009 Labour Website of the Year from that short-list.

I’ll make the nominations form available online as from tomorrow, announcing it in our mass mailing.

Readers will have about three weeks to make their nominations, which will close on 31 December.

In January, correspondents will have at least a couple of weeks to select the short-list.  Then voting will begin.

There’s a lot of programming work involved, as we basically recycle the software each year, but with modifications.  I don’t have all the stages ready yet, but the submission of nominations works and has been tested.

It works in 8 languages at the moment – English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, and Polish.

Here’s what Google Analytics has to say about the last month for LabourStart:

• 75,349 unique visitors
• 159,750 visits
• 244,274 page views

Most popular language home pages:

1. English – 160,368
2. Norwegian – 6,228
3. Finnish – 2,590
4. French – 916
5. Dutch – 798
6. Russian – 729
7. Chinese – 429
8. Indonesian – 375
9. Spanish – 338
10. Polish – 307
11. Swedish – 156
12. German – 104
13. Italian – 102
14. Turkish – 95
15. Esperanto – 91
16. Arabic – 86
17. Farsi – 62
18. Hebrew – 53
19. Danish – 46
20. Greek – 40
21. Portuguese – 32
22. Creole – 31
23. Bulgarian – 13

We now have a Greek version — no content yet, but we should have the first stories up today.  All thanks to our new correspondent there, Nikos Lountos.

Here’s what we just now received:

I understand that you’ve been upset with our technical support team. This is something that I can only apologize for. This is an aspect of our service that we’re always trying to improve. This is why your feedback is so important to us. We can now look through and see where and if we made mistakes. Then, we can look into making sure that this doesn’t happen again. Again, we can only apologize for this frustration that you’ve suffered. We will continue to work on this to serve you better. I show that the site is currently up and functioning. As a sign of good faith I have since added three months free hosting to your account.

With another 104 addresses, we’ll cross the 60,000 barrier. That’s something to celebrate.

Please check out my UnionBook blog – that’s where I’ll put all updates about this project.

The International Metalworkers Federation is asking us to launch an online campaign in support of the ITUA in Russia – we’re waiting for details but are likely to go live this week.