The Lenosphere IT Collective

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Hossam el-Hamalawy Blogging Diigo, Social Bookmarking, Social Networks, Tutorial, Video, Web2.0

Though I’ve been and still am a big Delicious fan, I started experimenting recently with Diigo, and I gotta say the latter absolutely kicks ass…! Get on Diigo ya comrades! Tutorials, tips and hacks will be provided soon..

Hossam el-Hamalawy Blogging Delicious, Diigo, Social Bookmarking, Social Networks, tools

The Lenosphere blog will be solely devoted to Web 2.0 related themes. My target audience, to be honest, is primarily the International Solidarity Tendency activists. After months of correspondence, discussions and chats with Comrade Ady, we both found ourselves in full agreement that, unfortunately, despite the successes and growth of the IST over the past few years in some parts of the world, the movement is still lagging behind when it comes to internet activism. Let’s be frank, most, if not all, the IST groups haven’t yet absorbed or realized the implications of the internet evolution and development of Web 2.0 on organizing for a workers revolution, missing out on an ever growing potential audience for socialist propaganda and agitation, as well as consuming logisitical resources that could have been optimized using the latest internet technological innovations…

Make no mistake, the real action at the end of the day happens on the ground, not in the cyberspace. And any regular reader of this blog should be fully aware I was, have been and am still a strong opponent of these moronic schemes about online strikes and revolutions… But that does not mean socialists should not use Web2.0 tools. The latter should constitute a sizable factor in planning our strategy and tactics in the fight against our governments.

The developments in the forces and relations of production, as Marx said, lead to changes in the superstructure. Well, with a quick google search on the implications of Web 2.0 on “business”, you get tons of results–articles, postings and books. But you don’t get the same amount of literature on what these changes mean for revolutionaries. We have not tackled the subject enough, neither organizationally nor ideologically.

If all our enemies and super-reactionaries from Israel and Obama to the Vatican Pope are embracing the Web 2.0 tools and strategies, doesn’t that arouse our interest if not ring alarm bells…? They have understood the potential of social networks in terms of outreach and mobilization. Shouldn’t we counter that? Shouldn’t we come up with a strategy and aggregate our efforts instead of continuing to act on individual initiatives?

While 3arabawy will continue to exist and get updated, as part of the Arabist Network, the Lenosphere and Ady’s Leninism 2.0 will serve as platforms for addressing Web 2.0-related themes, from news and multimedia productions (Videos, audios, etc..), to tutorials, tips, hacks and longer political essays.

The Lenosphere is still in the beta version. The layout design and a bunch of other tweeks are still undone, due to time constraints, but I thought of waiting no longer, especially when the Arabist blogs were down these past few days. So kindly be patient, and I hope I finish these layout changes and plugins by next week.

The next step will involve setting up an aggregator for the IST activists’ blogs, photos, Tweets, Jaikus, bookmarks and videos… So comrades, if your blog is not included on the original Lenosphere list, please submit your links in the comments section. To be clear, the aggregator is only for IST activists, but if you are an independent socialist or belong to other tendencies, feel free to submit your blog for review. I’ll be setting up an aggregator for “fellow travelers” blogs as associate members of the Lenosphere… That will take some time, probably weeks, so again kindly be patient as I compile the links to be posted…

And if any IST activist is reading this and he/she are neither bloggers, nor maintain presence in any of the social networks (Jaiku, Twitter, delicious, YouTube, flickr or Vimeo), then it’s about time!!

Hossam el-Hamalawy Blogging Bloggers, Blogging Tools, Egypt, IST, Leftists, Marxism, Social Networks, Socialists, Trotskyists, Web2.0 Activism

All the Arabist Network blogs, including mine, are still down, however we have finally got ourselves a new host, and the migration has started. Hopefully it should be all sorted out tomorrow, thanks to Issandr’s and Scot’s help… But again, delicious has been a savior..

Yesterday, Issandr set up a temporary frontpage for the Arabist.Net, which included the RSS feeds of our delicious bookmarks..

So even if we can’t disseminate information in the proper format on our blogs, still we are able to provide the readers with the latest resources and updates we are bookmarking, generating some form of updated content..

Meanwhile, the campaign to free Philip Rizk and the pro-Gaza detainees continues, and microblogging is still central to what we do..

The delicious page created for Philip, I was happy to notice, was circulated widely by activists in the different social networks: It was Jaikued, Tweeted, Facebooked, linked to in blog postings and circulated by emails… The delicious link itself was even bookmarked by delicious users!

But if there are others on the delicious network who are also following and bookmarking news about Philip, why don’t we all tag our bookmarks with the same unique tag: “6FebProGazaMarch”

This means when I click on “Recent” to check out the latest bookmarks by ALL delicious users who’ve been using that tag…

… then I’ll be creating a new delicious page, aggregating ALL bookmarks me and others have been tagging with “6FebProGazaMarch”… If that applied successfully with wide particpation, then in effect we’ve set up one hell of a pool of information about our campaign, continuously updated, and the efforts would be shared by more than one person…

So instead of circulating this link:
http://delicious.com/elhamalawy/6FebProGazaMarch

… it might be a better idea to start circulating that one:
http://delicious.com/tag/6FebProGazaMarch

The new aggregated page also has RSS feeds…

… which could be aggregated to your personal feed readers, and, more importantly, posted on other websites and blogs…

As I’m writing, only Moftasa, Gohary and the Center of Socialist Studies are pooling their links, together with me, into that page, coz we are the only ones tagging our bookmarks with those tags. Sarah and Amr for example have a good number of bookmarks, but unfortunately theirs don’t appear on the aggregated page since they haven’t used the “6FebProGazaMarch” tag.

I think in the future we should give this a thought… In the same way we get together to discuss what sort of blog we are launching for any new campaign, we can also come up with a unified delicious tag for that specific campaign. And it has to be a bit unique and unusual like “6FebProGazaMarch” coz this decreases the chances our pool won’t get “polluted” by other bookmarks we don’t want… For example, Philip is a pro-Gaza AUC student who was detained. When we are bookmarking links about him, I’m sure users will be tagging: “Student” “AUC” “Gaza” Activism” “Detainees”, etc… But these are commonly used tags.. If we decided to pool in the bookmarks under “Student”, other bookmarks for example about “students” in New Zealand could appear too. So choosing “6FebProGazaMarch” could be a good way to avoid that in our case, as it’s highly unlikely someone else is randomly using this tag to bookmark resources about unrelated issues…

Hossam el-Hamalawy Blogging Blogging Tools, Delicious, Egypt, Jaiku, Microblogging, Social Bookmarking, Social Networks, Tips, Twitter, Web2.0 Activism, تدوين, مصر

My blog was suspended the other day, together with all the Arabist.Net blogs, after high internet traffic crippled our host server.

Losing my blog however (which should be temporarily, I hope, as we are in the process of moving to a new host) did not mean I lost the ability to disseminate news and information about arrests, detentions, or whatever breaking news I wanted to get to the outside world. How? The answer is simple: Microblogging…

Let’s take the latest case of the arrest of Philip Rizk, part of an Egyptian police crackdown on a pro-Gaza campaign…

In general, I devote my main effort to the blog.. breaking news, important announcements for sure take priority.. The readership of 3arabawy ranges from roughly 18,000 to 40,000 visitors a month, so it makes more sense to post urgent updates on the blog. But besides my blog, I already had set up accounts on Delicious, Jaiku, Twitter.. These are all important social networking tools with millions of users around the world…

As soon as I received the news of the crackdown on Friday, I started bookmarking news about Philip’s arrest, giving the bookmarks the usual tags, like: HumanRights, Egypt, Activism, Gaza, Police.. but I made sure to add a specific tag, which is “6FebProGazaMarch”… This in effect meant that I created a delicious page, devoted to news about Philip and the crackdown…

A page, with a URL address that could be circulated, say, by emails and posted on websites…

A page that also has RSS feed, so you make it easier for people to receive your updated links as soon as they get bookmarked…

I used the TinyURL.com service to shorten the URL address and then sent it out to my contacts on Jaiku…

And I had already set up TwitterFeed which automatically collects the feeds from my jaiku account and posts them on my twitter page.. This meant that the delicious link was sent out to my network of followers on Twitter…

So here you go.. Whether the blog is up or not, breaking news and updates can still be communicated to the rest of the activist community and the media circles…

Hossam el-Hamalawy Blogging Blogging Tools, Delicious, Egypt, Jaiku, Microblogging, Social Bookmarking, Social Networks, Tips, Twitter, Web2.0 Activism