UNI Communicators' Forum

Here's a copy of my presentation on social networking for unions - both what union activists are doing with commercial social networks, and what unions could do to make social networking tools for our own activists.

An interesting snippet from UK new media magazine New Media Age this week. 28% of UK internet users are members of community action or charity support groups on social networks. This is more likely to be younger internet users, though 14% of online over-55s are still members of such groups.

Ning is very interesting. It's a platform for building and hosting your own social network - kind of like a blogispot for social networking. You get a Facebooki of your own for free, in return for them keeping all the money from adverts (or you pay them $240 a year for no ads, or to keep the revenue yourself).

www.ning.com

Another excellent blog post from Eric Lee. This time he's discussing the problems organisers may have when their identies can no longer be kept a secret. As more and more about us is written on the web and searchable, employers will be doing more detective work on people.

A recent organising campaign at Kettle Chips, a UK potato chip company, was defeated with the help of US unionbusters, The Burke Group. However, two Facebooki groups set up by concerned members of the public helped to raise the profile of the dispute, without union involvement. Guardian journalist David Hencke believes the union missed a big opportunity by not reacting quickly enough to get involved online, and has a good blog post on this at Comment Is Free.

A quick article from the UK Guardian newspaper which explains some of the major social networking sites to people who don't know them yet. Click here to read it.