A few weeks back we encouraged labor bloggers to take part in the "Take Back Labor Day" action - which involved agreeing to post blog entries on September 1st about what Labor Day really means. Funny thing, though, to participate would have meant working on Labor Day - which this blogger couldn't quite get himself to do.

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As time moves on, and we all sign up for more and more web services, inevitably we're going to forget the various usernames and passwords we're forced to use to keep our personal information at least moderately protected from the possibility of identity theft or worse.

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Since the issue was raised in the discussion following last week's post on commercial social networking services, it seems like a good time to look into a new bleeding edge alternative to services like Facebook and MySpace called distributed social networking.

However, it's much tougher to talk about a technology that is still just coming into existence than a more mature technology that's been around awhile and proved its worth; so hang on to your hats, this post is going to be a bit of a wild ride.

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To ensure a vibrant web presence and to make your site more visible to younger viewers, it's important to establish outposts on the major social networking sites.

The 900-pound gorillas of the social networking market are currently Facebook and MySpace. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, but each provide your organization with a free page and the ability to pipe in feeds from your existing website every time you post something new.
 

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The Pew Research Center for People and the Press released a study this week that might not seem to be of immediate interest to the labor movement. However, reading not so far between the lines of the results of their 2008 News Consumption and Believability Study reveals some good and bad news for unions working on improving their presence on the internet. And could signal an great opportunity for labor to create more online news outlets.

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For the second year in a row, the Communication Workers of America's "Speed Matters" campaign has released "A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States." The campaign surveyed almost 230,000 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico between May 2007 and May 2008 on their speedmatters.org website to gather the necessary data.

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Finally, Communicate or Die is getting some love! First thing you'll notice is the new look. We hope you like it. We still need to smooth over some obvious flaws and there are a lot of improvements coming. But in the tradition of free/open source software development, we thought we'd let our users play with this "beta" version and tell us what needs fixing.

Of course, technology and a flashier design can only get you so far, you need real live flesh and blood to breath life into an online community. So, I decided to hire Jason Pramas to actively reach out to individuals and organizations and encourage their participation in the CoD community. Jason not only has a long history of labor activism, he thinks deeply about the web and all of its implications. I bumped into Jason last month when he gave a presentation about his exciting Open Media Boston project, which aims to help promote quality community and labor journalism. The CoD community is very fortunate to have such an eminently qualified person working to help it grow and thrive again.

We'll set up a feedback form shortly. In the meantime, any and all comments about the site are appreciated below.

Just an FYI that we're launching a new version of the Communicate or Die site today. So please hold off new posts, comments or account registrations until we're ready ... you'll know when ...

by Steve Dondley and Jason Pramas

Quite the brouhaha this week between the AFL-CIO and arch-union buster Richard Berman.

It seems the AFL posted a blog entry in the "anti-union network" section of their American Rights at Work site that included newly-public documents from an ongoing lawsuit by Smithfield Foods against the United Food and Commercial workers. The documents detailed Berman's relationship to Smithfield.

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by Steve Dondley and Jason Pramas

Quite the brouhaha this week between the AFL-CIO and arch-union buster Richard Berman.

It seems the AFL posted a blog entry in the "anti-union network" section of their American Rights at Work site that included newly-public documents from an ongoing lawsuit by Smithfield Foods against the United Food and Commercial workers. The documents detailed Berman's relationship to Smithfield.

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Have you ever wanted to have your own TV channel? Or at least wanted the ability to broadcast your own programming live to many people at once?

If so, the future is here now thanks to live interactive video broadcast technology on the internet (if not, the future is still here now).

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We're excited to get folks posting here again; so we thought it would be good form to give everyone an idea of some of the tech we think is worth talking about on Communicate or Die.

In a nutshell, we're looking for posts about Web 2.0 - its promise and pitfalls - in relation to the labor movement.

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American Rights at Work, a "nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to promoting the freedom of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers," has called a blogswarm for this Labor Day. They're calling it "Take Back Labor Day," and simply ask that pro-labor folks agree to use their blogs or websites to write about what Labor Day really means on Sept. 1, 2008.

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Yesterday I attended a webinar run by AFL-CIO Online Mobilization Manager Chris Kenngot on the national fed's new LaborWeb content management system - now running in open beta and available for all interested AFL union leadership to try for free.

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Greetings, Communicate or Die viewers.

Just a quick note to introduce myself ... and let you all know that your favorite online community dedicated to the notion that the labor movement can (and must) effectively make use of all available internet technology is back.

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