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.
Specialist topics: Tech
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.
This article from 1995 was written as the internet started to go ‘mainstream’ and looks at the anarchist resources that already existed at that point in time online including the first WSM site online.
An examination of the first attempts to censor anarchists online from 1995. The current structure of the internet makes effectively censoring it a very difficult prospect. And the crude attempts to set activists up for persecution has already met a heated response as thousands have e-mailed protest letters to some of the publications involved. A key factor in keeping the information freely flowing will be how far workers using and maintaining the net go along with or oppose this censorship.
As we wind down after the struggle against Shell’s pipeline ship the Solitaire I’m using this blog post to bring together the bits of audio and video I recorded during that struggle and which have already been published as comments to articles on indymedia.ie. In the next days I’m also going to trawl through my old web site and transfer over reports I wrote on the Shell to Sea struggle from a couple of years back to this site which will give a pretty complete archive of what I’ve produced. Shell got the pipeline into the bay but the next cycle of struggle will be the toughest for them as they try and run it through Rossport itself to link up to the refinery.
A look at media coverage of the ending of the siege of the Japanese embassy in Lima in which the MRTA were executed. This article written at the time in 1997 also documents early attackes on radical news sites and archives on the internet.
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.