Infoshop.org
Encyclopedia
History
Infoshop was founded in January 1995 as the Mid-Atlantic Infoshop by Chuck Munson. Having previously co-founded an online archive of anarchist texts, the Spunk LibrarySpunk Library
The Spunk Library was an anarchist Internet archive. The name "spunk" was chosen for the term's meaning in Swedish , English , and Australian , summarized by the website as "nondescript, energetic, courageous and attractive".According to anarchist librarian Chuck Munson, the...
, in 1992, Munson established Infoshop as a general resource on anarchism, moving to the domain name Infoshop.org in 1998. Munson reorganized the website as a collective project in 2001, and , it is run by a core of nine people, supplemented by regular writers and volunteers. Having previously being involved in publishing Practical Anarchy
Practical Anarchy
Practical Anarchy was an anarchist magazine that was published quarterly by the Alternative Media Project. Begun in 1991 as an irregular publication, for many years it advocated anarchy as practice, such as organizing housing cooperatives, environmentalism, workplaces and DIY media. Its slogans...
magazine, the collective announced plans on launching a quarterly magazine titled Infoshop News & Views to go "head-to-head against other American leftist magazines".
Features
A prominent feature of the site is Infoshop News, an open publishing newswire similar to that of Indymedia. Initiated in 1997, the news service is one of several thousand English languageEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
publishers carried by Google News
Google News
Google News is a free news aggregator provided by Google Inc, selecting recent items from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm....
. The site has a number of other sections, including forums, and wikis. In April 2008, a link aggregator, Infoshop Links was launched, using software based on popular social bookmarking
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....
service Digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
. The site also mirrors the anarchist-written FAQ
FAQ
Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...
"An Anarchist FAQ
An Anarchist FAQ
"An Anarchist FAQ" is an FAQ written by an international work group of social anarchists connected through the internet. It documents anarchist theory and ideas while arguing that social anarchism is a better form of anarchism than individualist anarchism, which it critiques. It also explores other...
". A 2003 academic study of anarchist websites found that Infoshop was "the key anarchist site" and the only core anarchist site to closely cover the contemporary anarchist movement in addition to anarchist theory.