Anarchist Writers

The ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is a trade agreement being negotiated by the Obama administration through the United States Office of the Trade Representative. The trade agreement is particularly interesting on a number of points.

Way back around 1993 I co-hosted a political slot on a pirate radio station for a few weeks, that was my first experiment with audio rather than writing as a way of transmitting ideas. The experiment was brief and it was a decade later in 2005 before I returned to audio, this time online.  As well as talking a little about Radioactive this post looks at the technology I've used and methodology I've developed since then in the course of recording some 100 audio segments.  I include sample recordings so you can see how different equipment gives different results.

I was about to do an update when I noticed one of the authors is logged in so rather than risk have them lose whatever it is they are writing I'm going to hold off and fill the time by giving some details of visitor numbers, most popular articles, search terms etc.  The site has existed in some form for two years and our peak traffic so far was this October when we broke 10,000 unique visitors (10296 to be exact) and over 17,000 individual visits (the difference being due to some of the unique visitors coming here more than once in that period).  Our most popular article rather unsurprizingly is the Anarchist FAQ index page which has now had around 25,000 views since its creation a little over a year ago.

Every time I write a new blog I send a link to my Facebook friends, typically 10-20% will then look at the blog post. Use of Facebook is a minor bone of contention among activists with (at least in Ireland) a small minority who refuse to use it. They have a point, Facebook is structured in such a way that using it gives vast amounts of personal and political information out to anyone with access. The scary thing is that it turns out that even if you are careful with privacy settings that 'anyone' includes any random person who puts a quiz or another app together(see below) . Despite this I still use it both for political purposes but also for the intended social networking ones, in this blog I'm going to muse about why this is so.

A good while back I blogged that I'd set up a personal twitter account but wasn't really sure how useful it would be.  In the last months though I've been developing a system for using twitter to provide 'almost live' news from protests through iPhone apps like Tweetreel, pixelpipe and tweetmic.  This allows us to post photos, audio and video as well as simple text updates when we have someone with an iPhone (or similar smart phone) at a protest.

You can now follow Anarchist Writers blogs and articles on Twitter.  Follow anarchistwriter and notification of new blogs and articles will be posted with a link and summary as they are published on the site.

We are using twitterfeed to do this so this process is automatic, you might also want to follow anarkismo and wsmireland on twitter to get similar updates from those sites.

Anyone who attended one of my North American talks or who has followed my articles will have heard me mention the 'Grassroots Gathering' on more than one occasion.  This is/was a network of conferences held in Ireland from 2001 which served to bring everyone with libertarian politics together for the weekend and out of which a number of initiatives flowed.

I set up a twitter account about a year back, posted one tweet and never logged in again. With all the recent media hype (and the fact that they talk about it every show of the tech podcast TWIT (no relation) I listen to) I've decided to give it a second chance. This also ties into my intention of writing an articles on anarchist use of social networking, in particular looking at the legtimate concerns people have about security. We set up a WSM facebook account a couple of months back and its proved pretty useful to date but I'll hold further thoughts till I actually write that up.

The site has just been updated to Drupal 6.6 which gets all the security up to date. All existing modules were also updated and I've installed a number of new ones.

So this site is my first sole admin experiment with Drupal. As anyone who visited today will know it was rollercoaster. First the site was off line with a nice polite off line message - but for a long time.