Over the last few years, as fast internet connections have become the standard for more and more Americans, software has been developed by a number of companies and at least one defunct non-profit project to allow live video streaming (generally from broadcast satellite feeds) to people's computers for no additional money down.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.