Resources and tools

I'm looking for info, thoughts on using the Organic Groups modules in Drupal -- has anyone used them? Or decided not to for specific reasons?

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.

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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).

Twitter is yet another free Internet service that could open up new possibilities for union communication. Read on for more.

You've got a blog, posted a couple of podcasts and some videos on YouTube, now get ready for the next hot way to communicate: live streaming video. You heard it here first. A new company, less than 1/2 year old, called Ustream, offers live video streams to anyone who wants one, absolutely free. I've set one up and coupled it with a live chat feature for my company, Prometheus, and I absolutely love it.

Is it now relatively easy perchance to install drupal
via one of those hosted accounts (where one's capabilities
tend to be pretty restricted and they tend to assume any
thing that needs to be done can be done via cpanel)? It was once
the case that drupal was seriously on the outs with cpanel.
I hope that has changed?

I'm thinking of getting back in the web site business
to promote select issues in my corner of the jungle especially since I got kicked off of my "own" mailing list! (Ok they couldn't really evict me when I owned the account housing the list since only I could remove addresses, but in the interests of democracy I decided to go along with the group's decision which was basically that the really talkative people should shut up. Democracy can be a pain when it doesn't go your way :-) Seriously tho it just takes one of those "I cannot tolerate any 'nonessential' messages" types to completely chill off a list in my experience. I've seen many a technical mailing list get sunk by one or two of the 'signal-to-noise' or "off-topic" chronic dampeners. It is very unlikely in my experience that a mailing list won't just plain die once even just one person of stature puts out the "stifle it" message.

Which is probably why people invented forums :-) What is good about a mailing list is potentially limiting it to the right
people eg if one wants to cover workplace issues and not have
management reading along. I have yet to see a really good way
to implement this as a forum without having people apply and
be approved to have accounts which they have to log in to and
all that... Am I missing any developments in that area?