And in another interesting note, Italian IBM workers are organizing a virtual picket in Second Life. At first, this seemed kind of pointless to me, but IBM has a substantial presence in SL, which is not surprisingly a great promotional venue/channel/medium for a company like IBM.

There have, of course, been online actions before, and even a kind of online picketing and leafletting (Ken Hamidi and FACE-Intel springs to mind). But in virtual worlds narrowly speaking, this looks to be kind of a first.

LabourStart in the UK has been running an email campaign in defense of Fremantle home care workers. The campaign prompted a legal threat from Fremantle, resulting in LabourStart's ISP forcing them to shut down the site.

LabourStart and the UNISON public sector union were prepared, however, and brought the site back up offshore at www.wewillnotbesilenced.org.

Turnabout is fair play, after all.

Building our Technorati Profile. I think Technorati just got a lot cooler. Or we did. Or both. Or maybe even neither.

Many of us will probably remember, however vaguely, Robert Putnam and his famous "bowling alone" thesis about the decline of social capital in the US. Some of us remember thinking that it was more about transformation and reallocation of social capital, but to make that case right now would be kind of pointless and a distraction from the work Putnam is doing now (even if it's right, which it may not be).

Putnam has just published the results of five years of research on the effects of diversity on social capital within communities (which here means neighborhoods or something similar). The conclusion: diversity reduces social capital within the community. Most striking, and most distressing, it turns out too that members of a diverse community not only trust persons of other ethnic groups less, they also mistrust others of the same ethnic background.