UNI Communicators' Forum

Union Newswire is a new site from the TUC. It's very much in betai (meaning it's likely to fall over at a moment's notice), but could be an interesting model for other union groups to look at.

It syndicates links to press releases from 19 UK union sites (those that publish press releases online in a compatible format) into one central feed. Only the titles and links are kept on www.unionnewswire.org.uk - the headings link out directly to the press releases on those unions' sites.

Users can subscribe to follow the stream of releases as they are updated by visiting the site home page, by entering their email to receive a daily digest, by subscribing to the central RSS feedi, or by following the service on Twitteri at www.twitter.com/unionnewswire

Once set up, the site doesn't need to be updated manually, as it pulls new content direct from the 19 sites it is connected to, and republishes automatically into the various distribution formats.

The whole thing is built in the open sourcei CMSi Wordpress, using the Feedwordpress plugin. Some unions that publish their press releases online but not yet by RSS are also included, thanks to the RSS scrapiing service open.dapper.net and feeds that don't quite fit are modified in Feedburner.com or Yahoo Pipes.

As all these tools are free or open source, the service only costs the price of a domain name and a shared hosting account to run (around £20 a year). I think aggregators may become useful tools for unions, helping us to share information around the movement for little cost, or to build new views of a topic out of different types of information source - providing a useful service and meeting point for people with any given interest, all under the banner of the union.