montevideo said:
ah yes interweb statistics, always reliable.
Sorry, that was a bit of a cheap shot, but I do think those stats are fairly reliable.
Again it depends what you want a resource to be. The newswire is simply media echo; transfering info from other sites (which are more informed, more informative & generally provide a better service). Simply linking to these sites would i think be more ingenuous & honest of you.
Not all the news is copied, we do write a fair bit ourselves, but we're not quite at the stage yet where we can write everything ourselves. We're always looking to expand the news and find new people to get involved so we can improve it.
The library at larc has a wider range of books, pamplets, magazines bigger newspaper archive with a greater political scope, & a greater variety of subjects (woefully underused, but there you go), what your library provides then is an easy access limited service. If convenience is useful then you have a point, but to suggest it is 'massive' is strectching it a bit, by a long shot.
I think several thousand texts is pretty 'massive' but that could be a difference of opinion, all I know about the LARC library is some books appeared there after disappearing from Freedom so can't comment on whether it's better or not. I do think accessibility is important, having a great resource that no one can use isn't much good, thousands of people view pages in our library each month, how many people use LARC's one? The library is another aspect of the site we're constantly working on, and trying to get more people involved with.
The network aspect could potentially be the most useful & indeed interesting part, groups & organisations have a communal point of contact to exchange ideas, activities, information etc, (strangled at birth by the living abortion that is the forums). Of course for networking to have any credibity all the groups involved would have to have equal input & integral to the decsion making process of the site. This would of course involve a bit of organisation & graft (2 things libcom people have no experience in). It would also mean taking control out of the hands of a few individuals & opening up the resource to collective responsibility (something the libcom peole have no experience in).
I can't say I'm a huge fan of the forums, there are some quality threads on there, but others aren't so good. I think your points about networking and the decision making process of the site could apply if the site had been setup by a large number of groups. But it wasn't, I don't see why we should be accountable to anyone but ourselves, Libcom is our project we've done the hard work, why should we let other people/groups participate in our decision making processes (which is very democratic and non-authoritarian). The Libcom Group is well organised, works hard at mainting such a large resource, and we take collective responsibility for what we do. Trying to accuse us of not believing in those principles or not working along those lines is a bit out of order.
As a port of call for lazy radicals run privately by a group of individuals it is indeed a resource. A useful one to whom, i have no idea?
That's a bit harsh, I think half a million page views a month suggests that it is a useful resource, otherwise people wouldn't be visiting it would they! I wish you wouldn't use your personal and political difference with people in our group to condem the whole resource.
Attica - we're aware of the gaps, they're something we're working on, as I've said above the site is constantly expanding. I'm not trying to say the site is a totally comprehensive resource for anyone interested in class struggle, but it's a start and probably the closest to a comprehensive resource than anything else I've seen.
