1. The left needs to use the Net far more – and more effectively – than at present. That does NOT mean abandoning other methods entirely.
2. The Net is useful for spreading ideas, connecting people, and promoting activities happening offline. It should not be a substitute for activity in the ‘real world’ – it reports on, helps organise, and promotes that activity.
3. Most people are now online – it is therefore no longer credible to claim emphasising it as a political tool is elitist or middle class. It simply isn’t.
4. Conservatism in resisting online activism is linked to conservatism in other ways. Bending the stick (in Leninist terms) towards using the Net properly goes together with overcoming conservatism and inertia inside a revolutionary party more generally.
5. It’s not enough to bung printed material online. We have to utilise the particular strengths of the web – it’s more dynamic, immediate, interactive, audio-visual, etc.
6. We should utilise the Net’s potential to enable people to be participants not just readers, feeding in their own reports, stories etc and offering own comments. It is interactive not one-way. This is consistent with Lenin’s Pravda, but with modern tools.
7. Any active socialist who isn’t on Facebook should be. Simple as that!
8. Many non-socialists in anti-capitalist and other movements have been far quicker at getting hang of all this. The left has to catch up. Poor use of the Net is one reason for marginalisation of the left in some campaigns and movements.

Follow my account…

Delicious is still an important social network, even when it’s not as advanced as Diigo, so I recommend to use the cross posting function available on Diigo, which allows your bookmarks to appear on Delicious as soon as they are bookmarked on Diigo..

Please also add the delicious account of the Socialist Students to your networks. Bookmarks on Haqqi are also available here… Photos of socialist student activities will be uploaded to the Haqqi and Resistance Flickr accounts as well as the e-Socialists Flickr group, while videos will be available on Mashahed’s Vimeo account…

To receive continuous updates about student activism on your mobile phone in Arabic and English, make sure you join the #CUNOW Jaiku channel, and please also add the Jaiku accounts of: Haqqi, Cairo U Socialists, Resistance Students, ReSo, Mashahed, Lenin1917, Tadamon and 3arabawy, to your contacts…

Accessing all this info will be much easier, once we are finished with setting up the Lenosphere Aggregator (still under construction)…

I’m gathering all the pictures I took of blue and white collar workers (mainly in Egypt and Britain) during industrial actions, activist meetings, social gatherings–all in one flickr set…

My flickr account generates RSS feed, from where you can keep an eye on my uploads…

But also each flickr set, including Workers, has its own RSS feed…

Since I have great interest in increasing internet traffic to this specific set, I added the set’s RSS feed to my Jaiku page…

This meant each time I added a photo to the Workers set, it was displayed on my Jaiku homepage and my network of contacts was notified, in addition to more who follow my Jaiku via RSS feed readers…

I also asked a good number of labor activists to add the set’s RSS feed to their Jaiku webfeeds, and they kindly did. This meant even more internet traffic, and more hits on the set, as the images traveled through their circle of contacts who are not necessarily in my social network…

Already I can notice Jaiku.com is now featuring in the list of top ten referring sites to my flickr account.. In other words, Jaiku has been useful in familiarizing new audience with the Egyptian workers’ struggle in a visual medium.

I urge all comrades involved in strikes and demonstrations to document their actions (putting into consideration of course potential security risks) visually, either by photos or videos. Make it a standard procedure. If there is a demo today, then you are bringing your camera along to shoot. But then please do NOT leave those files to rot on your hard drive… Upload them online, and share them with millions of other internet surfers, including those who will get inspired into similar actions. Our rulers have understood the power of images, from the inception of class society, and though there is tons of socialist literature on photography and art, I honestly feel we are dealing with those issues in a very abstract theoretical way.  We have to put more effort in translating these ideas into concrete action.. This means that when we are thinking of putting together our print publications, photos should play a central role in spreading our propaganda and agitation.. It means we give a good thought what our blogs and websites are gonna look like, not just dump dry text on a plain template assuming that only the power of words is enough.. It means also we should seek the recruitment of photographers, artists and graphic designers into the movement, allowing them a bigger say in how campaigns and propaganda should be conducted…