Welcome to my latest attempt at long-tail-stretching – laborgeek.org, a reading list for Web2.0 technology in the international labour movement.

This isn’t really a site in its own right – All it does is signpost the way to current resources that you might find useful. Of course, this is working on my slightly unconventional definition of the word ‘useful’, which appliesto people similarly obsessed with new media technologies as they apply to this glorious movement of ours (citation needed).

The site studies the RSS feeds of blogs and forums that specialise in union ICT issues, and merges all their posts automatically into one feed, so you only need to remember one place for all the news. It also scoops up and includes del.icio.us bookmarks that the network shares with us – useful sites or resources that others think everyone should be aware of. And it merges all this with the odd story from web news sources, where it matches a whole bunch of geeky union keywords.

And then it spits it out. You can get a combined feed from laborgeek’s home page, in your RSS reader, or delivered daily by email – whatever is easiest for you.

I’ve done this as a test too, as I happen to think this is a technology which will suit unions down to the ground, particularly internationally. I hope unions will be using long tail portals like this (micro-specialised, heavily automated) to establish authority and make new connections in all sorts of areas.

Picture 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 in a very C21 way.

So enough already – Start reading the feed, and get stuck into the conversation that’s growing out there. Come on in, the water’s nerdy!