[DML Competition 4: Badges for Lifelong Learning]

Tracking VozMob's Influence

Author: François Bar

Posted: 1/29/2010 - 8:08am

In: Digital Media & Learning Competition 2, Voces Moviles (Mobile Voices), Competitions

One central motivation pushing current vozmob users to write their stories, they tell us, is their desire to change the image of day laborers, and of immigrants in general. This was starkly brought home when, during one of the vozmob Tuesday night workshops, they googled “day laborer” and discovered that the first search result was a hate site listed with the following description: “Day Laborers: Some of the most violent murderers, rapists, and child molesters, are illegal aliens who work as day laborers.” By publishing true stories about their daily lives, vozmober@s dream they might some day knock down that top search result.

Are we having any effect, by that standard? There are signs that we might. For example, following vozmob’s coverage of the household workers national conference last November in Oakland, CA, a google search for “trabajadoras de casa” done on January 26 2010 returns vozmob in 6th position (that’s on the French google.fr site. On the U.S. google.com, vozmob is the 8th result). When searching for “jornalero”, vozmob is now the 33rd result. And searching for “day laborer”, vozmob now comes up #188 – still too far down the list to make a dent in the top rank of hateful daylaborers.org, but visible nonetheless.

As we prepare to re-design the vozmob.net site, broaden the participant base, and publicize the site more widely in the coming months, this seems a good time to start tracking our search rank more systematically. Using rank checker, a firefox extension, I have set up a weekly rank search on google, yahoo, and live for the following keywords (suggestions for additions are welcome):