Every once in a while, an innovation comes along on the web that’s truly useful for trade unionists. One of these is something brand new that you’ve probably never heard of and it’s called “Live Bookmarks”.

A decade ago, when the web was young, the creators of the Netscape browser came up with something called “bookmarks”. This was a pretty simple way for you to keep a list of websites you frequently returned to. The term “bookmarks” was an odd one, as that implied that you were in the middle of reading something, paused, and needed to mark where you were. Which is not actually what this was all about.
Microsoft came out with its own web browser in the mid-1990s and, as Microsoft tends to do, decided to create its own terminology. No longer would there be bookmarks. Now we had “favorites”. Same thing, different name.
If you use the web a lot, chances are you make extensive use of bookmarks. If you’re really well organized, you’ll have organized your bookmarks into different categories.
I have always found bookmarks to be an indispensable tool for my work, though I have to admit that I often find people in trade union offices who have no bookmarks at all — or only have the ones which came with their web browser. I guess no one ever explained to them what bookmarks are and how they work.
Those people, like the rest of us, do return to the same web pages again and again, but they do so by either remembering the web addresses or by writing them down somewhere. I have even met people who use Google instead of bookmarks — every time they want to visit, say, the LabourStart website, they key the word “LabourStart” into Google and it gets them there.
Bookmarks could even be shared throughout organizations, though my experience with the research department of one British union convinced me that maybe the time wasn’t yet ripe for this. While running a workshop on use of the web, when I suggested that all members of the department could share their favorites, one asked me “what favorites were”. So even some trade union researchers were not yet using this important tool.
Over the last few years, innovation in web browsers has largely died out thanks to Microsoft’s having won the “browser wars” of the late 1990s. Netscape is now only a memory, and the Norwegian alternative browser, Opera, has only a tiny market share. But there has always been hope for those who want using the Internet to be easier and faster and more secure — and that hope is Mozilla.
Mozilla is a project that resulted from Netscape’s realization that it had lost the battle to Microsoft. Its task was to create the best, most secure, fastest, most standards-compliant web browser and email client around.
That promise has largely been fulfilled with the recent launch of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. But in addition to creating a better web browser, the Mozilla team has actually come up with a real innovation, something new and interesting.
They have decided to turn their web browser into an RSS reader.
Now for most of you, that means absolutely nothing. And for good reason. RSS, which currently stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a tool that webmasters like myself have used to allow syndication of content. It’s been around since 1997, which makes it positively ancient by Internet standards. And it’s the basis of LabourStart’s Labour Newswire, which is used by hundreds of trade union websites around the world.
It’s not exactly the thing that ordinary folks need to know much about.
But RSS always promised more. It promised to be a way to have current content on your desktop, without your having to necessarily visit websites. (There was a similar project in the mid-1990s called “push” technology which promised the same thing; for a while it seemed to be making enormous progress and then evaporated during the Internet dotcom bust.)
Today, there are a number of programs around which serve as RSS readers for your desktop and I have friends who swear by them. FeedDemon is one the better-known of these.
The people at Mozilla decided to integrate the idea of syndication with bookmarks, and came up with “Live Bookmarks”.
Here’s how it works.
Let’s say you’re using the latest version of the Mozilla browser, which is now called Firefox. Go to the LabourStart web page at http://www.labourstart.org In the lower right corner of your screen, you’ll see a tiny orange rectangle with the white letters ‘RSS’ on it. If you click on it, a little box opens up that says ‘Subscribe to RSS 2.0 feed’. You click on that, and you’re done.
That was easy enough, but what have you actually done? You’ve created a bookmark that changes as the content of the LabourStart front page changes.
Previously if you’d bookmarked our page, you’d click on the bookmark and go to our main page, scrolling down to see our news headlines.
But if you create a “live bookmark,” those news headlines appear as a list inside your own bookmarks. You can see those headlines whether or not you are online. And LabourStart’s headlines are updated automatically every 15 minutes, whether you have visited our site or not.
If I move my cursor over the LabourStart “live bookmark” in my Mozilla Firebox web browser, I now see a list of the last 15 top news stories from the site.
This is particularly useful for news websites which frequently change. Some of those sites are full of advertisements and distractions when in fact all you really want to see are the last few news stories. A good example can be found on the BBC website at http://news.bbc.co.uk.
The updates to your “live bookmarks” take place according to whatever the webmasters at those sites have decided. On LabourStart, it’s every fifteen minutes. Other sites may be less frequent.
Nearly every web log (blog) you visit will have the RSS feed built in. What that means is that in Mozilla Firefox, you’ll see that orange “RSS” button appearing.
When we look at trade union websites, few if any seem to be aware of this possibility. The AFL-CIO, the Canadian Labour Congress and Britian’s Trade Union Congress don’t offer this service. (Nor does the IWW.) But some unions which have pioneered innovation on the web do offer built-in RSS news feeds which “live bookmarks” can read. One good example is Canada’s largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). Go to their website at http://www.cupe.ca and you’ll see what I mean.
If you’re a union webmaster, you need to do two things. First, you need to create an RSS newsfeed which is regularly updated. Use Google to find one of the many pages telling you how to do this. Second, you need to make sure that your website contains a line of code telling Mozilla Firefox where it can find the RSS file it needs to create “Live Bookmarks”. On LabourStart’s home page, you can see this in our source code.
If you’re not a webmaster, but just someone who uses the web, download Mozilla Firefox today and check out how Live Bookmarks will transform the way you see the web. Go
here.
As more and more of us abandon the insecure, slow and bug-ridden Microsoft Internet Explorer for the better browsing experience of Mozilla Firefox, we will begin to check out the sites we regularly visit — including our union sites — to see if we can get them to show “Live Bookmarks”. This will put pressure on unions to begin to include RSS feeds as part of their websites. Finally, an innovation in web browser technology that will drive further changes in the way we build — and use — websites.