blog aggregator
Hi guys,
I saw this today and thought of you...
I run the UK blog aggregator TIGMOO.co.uk, which has grown in the last year to syndicate 95 UK union blogs. It's based on Drupal's own news aggregator module, and is ludicrously easy to maintain. People interested in views from around the labour movement now have one URL/feed to go, instead of having to bookmark lots individually. Hopefully we're encouraging more to take it up, building our cadre of 2.0 activists and encouraging a wider debate on different people's insider opinions around unionism.
Seeing the note on Workplace Profs' blog made me think a US union blog aggregator is a quick win you could maybe add to CoD in a US context. It could provide a very useful service to union bloggers (a little traffic, and a few comments that a community could generate is often all it takes to encourage someone to keep blogging and get better at it), expand your contacts with union bloggers themselves, and bring a few more people by the CoD site and postings on a regular basis to get the news feed. You already found a few on your Great Labor Leader blog hunt, plus there are some other great union blogs you already know of, and networking might encourage the rest to apply to you direct, rather than hunting them out.
What do you reckon?
On a similar tip, I thought I might do a duplicate of TIGMOO for all the blogs now which are dealing with union tech issues around the world. Would CoD be up for being included in a combined feed internationally on that?
cheers,
John
Yes, has been on my mind for a while
Doing something like this has been on my radar. Once I get CoD rolling the way I want, other projects like this will be taken on. Thanks for the link.
You can absolutely include our feed to the new blog you are setting up.
And consider yourselves aggregated...
...on new toy www.laborgeek.org (thanks!)
cool!
thanks for the add ...
:)
It's also a proof of concept really. I did www.tigmoo.co.uk in drupal as a fairly heavy duty RSS aggregator (with its out-of-the-box aggregator module), but I think I prefer a fantastic wordpress plugin called feedwordpress, which I used for this one. I think, now that everyone and their dog has an RSS feed (and services like the Dapper one you mentioned recently) fix up the gaps, aggregators have a lot of potential for unions, seeking to be a hub between public information, grassroots information and their own campaigns.
For example, a GUF (Global Union Federation), wanting to build a reputation worldwide for working with a particular multinational employer. An aggregator like this lets them throw together a portal that will be of interest to employees and commentators on that company - presenting the union as a natural place for informed discussion of the company (and building them a nice comms channel to a very relevant audience), all on a miniscule set up and maintain budget. To do this, they scoop from a couple of union bloggers, official or grassroots, who are dealing with the company in different countries, that part of their own press release feed which mentions the company, and those of some of their affiliates, a central editorial blog for the portal, shared social bookmarks and keyworded business news. Everyone wins - the union participants are linked together and get more traffic, and the GUF is fulfilling its role as enabler and facilitator for unions.