When lifestyle gurus attack…

The case of Mumsnet vs Gina Ford, M’lud. A bit of a spat in the world of Contented Babies this week, after übernanny Ford took umbrage at uncomplimentary postings on a volunteer run community site for mums. Her lawyers have demanded 5 conditions of Mumsnet, two of which seem reasonable, and two slightly over the …

Here, kitty kitty

Good coverage in FT, BBC, Guardian for today’s new TUC company finder tool – it’s a neato search that lets you find out company structures and performance for UK companies – things like profits, shareholders, ultimate holding companies and so on. Unsurprisingly though, the angle that’s been picked up on in the media is the …

Hadi Never Died

A while back I had the honour of meeting some trade unionists from different Iraqi unions at a UK union event. I remember being extremely impressed by their bravery in trying to build a labour movement against the odds. One had received death threats simply for being a woman in a high profile position, another …

Turning Japanese

Dress down Tuesday, hurrah, courtesy of the TUC! Pity I’m normally fairly lax on this front anyway. I tend to start a new job looking fairly dapper (I invariably have to buy proper trousers and shoes for the first time in ages), but then as I start spotting more and more colleagues in elements of …

Workers of Cybertron, unite!

Sometimes being a union activist can seem a bit like being a living history exhibit – especially when you’re something of a n00b sitting in a branch meeting with all the unfathomable age-old rules and age-old grudges. Anyway, it’s nice to know, via this missive from the future published in The Morning News, that giant-mega-space-robots …

Ain’t you got no home to go to?

Well, yes apparently we do now, and it’s called Labourhome.org. Very mysterious, a nice open blog to stimulate debate in Labour’s digital grassroots (grassw00ts?) circles – a MySpace for us tired lefty hacks. It’s quite elegant (in the way only an empty website can be) and it seems to be built to encourage newbies to …

Euro(sceptic)vision

This week’s B3ta challenge “How to re-elect the Tories” is turning out quite amusing (mind you, they always tend to). Dave loves MySpace and the interwebnet apparently, so I hope he is listening to some of the excellent freebie think-tankery on offer. Here’s my suggestion. Visit the rest at http://www.b3ta.com/challenge/tories/

Not a lot of people (want you to) know that!

Amnesty are getting all new media at the moment, joining the NUJ in dissing Yahoo! for their cynical dobbing in of a Chinese dissident journalist, and now running a very clever campaign to disseminate bits of info that some authority somewhere has censored. You got a blog? Marvellous. Bung a snippet of code onto it …