Poblish app 1.0.2

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The new version of our free, political feed-reading iPhone app has been submitted, and should be ready for download within the next few days.

What’s new? Well, you can access your favourite blogs and topics, and re-run your favourite searches, all with one click, using the new Tagged Feeds feature. Adding new favourites is also just one click!

I’ve also removed Ads from the app, and you should find that recent topic results are more accurate than ever.

Thanks to OpenAmplify for their link to the current version (1.0.1) of the app. Need to get the word out more!

New Article features

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Poblish has always provided a “more articles like this” facility for every article on the system – not just related articles from that blog or Twitter feed, but related articles from all blogs and Twitter feeds. This list used to appear next to each article, crammed into a column that was always just a little too narrow to make the list truly usable, so I’ve moved it to a new screen which you can pop up using the big “Explore…” button.Explore button

We’ve also restored the “Similar Bloggers” facility and put it alongside the list of articles, to help you explore other bloggers who deal with similar themes. Finally, if you’re logged-in, you’ll find your own individual list of recommended articles. This uses the latest collaborative filtering techniques to suggest a list of articles based on your own ratings, flags, favourites, as well as those of people with tastes similar to your own.

Above the Explore button, you’ll see what looks like a “tag cloud” for the article. However, what you’re seeing is much cleverer than what 99% of other applications offer. We use semantic analysis to determine the article’s key themes, or “Zones“, rather than simply relying on the categories the blogger chose; we rank them according to how often they have been mentioned during the past 24 hours; and we provide a link to the Zone’s home page, where you can see – and follow – a feed of matching articles.

The point of all this is to seamless weave articles – whether blog posts or Twitter posts – into the greater and wider world of political content, using state-of-the-art techniques, and to make it easier than ever for people to explore and to learn.

Churnalism.com

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Churnalism.com is an independent, non-profit website built to help the public distinguish between original journalism and ‘churnalism’ – where what appears to be a genuinely journalistic newspaper or online news article turns out to be a recycled press-release, quite possibly from a special-interest group, or self-interested campaigning organisation.

It’s partly because of this habit of journalists – the BBC Health site has been a particular bugbear in the past – that I created the “Positive Political Blogging” campaign, last year. My goals were to mobilise bloggers against churnalism, and to produce a system by which – with the help of a bit of technology – the output of bloggers could become a replacement news service, one whose output was much higher quality, more varied, and less biased than what journalists of the big newspapers and online news sites could find elsewhere (“Harnessing the distributed intelligence of the blogosphere“, I called it.)

Back to Churnalism: their service allows people to run comparisons of press releases – indeed any news article – against the huge Journalisted archive of online newspaper articles. It’ll point out any sections that the journalist seems to have copied and pasted from the article you supply, and give you a score to show just how much of a paste job it was. Why not try some examples? Even better, Churnalism has an API allows developers of other sites to hook into this service.

With that in mind, I’ve hooked Poblish up to try out the new API, and you can see the results on any article page. You can try this one, for starters. The numbers suggest that there were no fewer than 2662 similarities with the Guardian article, which is pretty convincing evidence of widespread copying and pasting.

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In case you’re wondering, Poblish strips out all quotations before passing articles to Churnalism – that way we don’t flag up articles that, quite correctly, refer to the original article or press-release. By contrast, pasting without quotations, without analysis, and without evidence of original thought, is pretty much what this campaign is all about. We expect journalists to do this essential part of their job, just as we hope that bloggers apply much the same principles.

Now, you might be thinking: “Hang on, is Poblish just comparing blog posts and news articles with other news articles? How about tracing these articles back to the hack or PR who first created them?”  OK, there’s an element of truth there, but as Poblish expands its coverage I’d like to see us aggregating more of the press-releases and think-pieces too, and to use our existing – and Churnalism’s new – analysis tools to make this kind of research a breeze for readers.

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Final thoughts: yes, I’m very impressed with the Churnalism API, though I’d really like to see, if possible:

  • Article titles, not just URLs (see above).
  • Links back to Churnalism’s own beautifully user-friendly result pages – just showing the number of matches isn’t very compelling – and / or:
  • More results and statistics I could render myself.

All in all, a great start! Hope to show you more developments in due course…

Firefox search plugin for Poblish

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Poblish now supports OpenSearch, which means that when visiting the site using Firefox (and possibly other browsers, apparently including Internet Explorer 7 and later), a menu item named “Add Poblish Search” appears in the search engines menu of your browser toolbar.

Once selected, a new Poblish search engine appears in your toolbar’s menu, like so.

This gives you the ability to search Poblish from any other site. Find something political you’re interested in? A person, a place, or a policy? Type them in the box wherever you see our icon, and hit return. Something like this will soon appear:

Poblish inspirations: problems with blogging

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Sorry for the navel-gazing, but I thought I’d repost this brain-dump of mine, from April 2009, which currently exists only as a Facebook note. It’s interesting in a way, because it put me on the path to discovering Debategraph, and to using many of the ideas in formulating Poblish in June and July 2009 (here‘s what I boiled down – and developed – the ideas into).

Problems with blogging:

Reading and writing are easy; listening, comprehending, adapting, and acting are optional, and hard.
Quality and ‘level of thought’ are independent.
Disembodied, fragmentary, duplicated, rhetorical, inconsistent.
Arguments die out, rather than resolve. Boredom? Multiple ‘roots’ to the solution?
Current blog-commenting methodology has identical problems. That’s why it’s dissatisfying for bloggers, and often unhelpful, policy-wise.

Who learns? Who wins the argument, and how? Sheer weight of numbers on one side? ConservativeHome will choose differently from LabourHome, come what may. Best argument might win, but perhaps only best on its own terms?

Against partisanship? Probably. Against ideology? Not necessarily.

We want policy made, actions taken, but where’s the connection between our words, our arguments, our agreements, and implementation – nationally, or far closer to home. A binding contract for politicians? Gap between entering into a debate and taking responsibility/ paying for implementation is the ‘irresponsibility’ gap that plagues online debate, and the alienation gap for casual politicos.

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Imagine a network/tree of arguments (agreements?), evidence, and contexts/environments. How can these be seen as a network – visually. Can every argument be reduced to this format, to political concepts/’atoms’, and plotted? Could this be done by volunteers, or via an algorithm? A manual mapping project? People do this every time they comment on, or respond to an argument, but the decentralisation / duplication of blogs, and use of the English language, means that ‘revelations’ can be missed.

Why a network, or tree? Because all ‘successful’ arguments – leaves/nodes on the tree – must be consistent with one another / branched to another.

Can this technique identify logical inconsistencies, stripping them out? And deliberate misdirection?

Surely we will have an infinity of trees (‘policy spaces’?), each one based around irreducible, mutually inconsistent ‘atoms’, but as the society / polity decides upon its atoms, the number of possible ‘policy-spaces’ reduces until one remains, and a fully consistent policy-map remains.

This might partly be how policy is currently made, and definitely how it’s implemented, but all this goes on behind closed doors.

Only a temporary equilibrium: any ‘fact’ or argument could break it.

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‘Evidence’: how can this be weighed against (any consistent) argument without an external ‘value’ system. Well, how is it now?

The key points for me are, still:

  • Reading and writing are easy; listening, comprehending, adapting, and acting are optional, and hard.
  • Arguments die out, rather than resolve.
  • Gap between entering into a debate and taking responsibility/ paying for implementation is the ‘irresponsibility’ gap that plagues online debate [...]

I’m not sure why there’s been so little interest in addressing these problems. Actually, no, I’m pretty sure I do know why, but aren’t the consequences of not dealing with them obvious enough?

IntenseDebate comments at Poblish

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I’ve hooked Poblish up to use the IntenseDebate comment service, which means that each and every article we aggregate at Poblish can be commented-on at Poblish. As we already enable our users to create – and rate – new versions of any blog post, we’re providing blog readers with the greatest possible flexibility.

Now, this is not without possible controversy. Perhaps the most likely charge – given that the original blog post may have its own set of comments at its original blog – is that by creating a parallel comment facility, we ‘split’ the debate. I understand that entirely. In an ideal world, Poblish would provide a second window onto one, single stream of comments. Unfortunately, as so often, the technology does not exist to make this possible. And besides, I disagree: all debates are split – the nature of blogging is that debates spill from blog to blog, and that we rely on technology as best we can to track them down.

The advantages of doing what we’re doing are that we can provide all the benefits of IntenseDebate’s reputation-management, plugins, and social-media integration, to all bloggers – which is substantially better than what Blogger and WordPress supply as standard. Even better, IntenseDebate offers nested comments, and anything that makes comments easier to follow, and less like sequential blobs of text, has to be a good thing. (Don’t forget that we always provide prominent links back to the original post – if the original blog and post still exist.)

Finally, Poblish is an international, non-partisan service, so we should have a more diverse readership than most blogs. If we can bring a wider range of readers to your blog than you would normally get, that’s surely a positive thing.

Assertion-flagging: for less partisan, prejudiced blogging

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If you haven’t already seen it at at Slugger O’Toole, at Left Foot Forward, at LibDem Voice, or at the Daily Telegraph, my submission to the Political Innovation project – for innovative, conversational politics – appears below. There are quite a few good comments at the aforementioned blogs, so it’s worth having a look around.

“Every political blogger is motivated by the need to fight against bigotry, prejudice, and ill-informed, unjustifiable assertion. This is a fine and noble cause, because the spreading of false beliefs – without the evidence to support them – is bad for all of us, as is the displacement of informed argument by mere rhetoric. All the more so when the perpetrator is powerful or influential.

However, bloggers – regular journalists too, and political representatives such as MPs – are only human, and frequently counter the prejudices and assertions of their political enemies with those of their political friends.

We need a solution that allows writers to write and thinkers to get their thoughts into print, but that gives the ultimate power of scrutiny over blogs, online newspapers, and think-tanks – whether they like it or not – to their millions of readers. A service that makes it easy for readers to flag-up the unsubstantiated assertions that bloggers and journalists make – in a seamless, a structured, and a visible way – so that they may be held to account, and asked to back up their claims. Addressing public concerns is good for politics, as well as for one’s reputation. Not responding would give out a less desirable signal…

I believe that a centralised service like this would encourage more thoughtful blogging, reward the best bloggers, and penalise those who are the most shrill, the most partisan, the least constructive, and the least conversational – all without the need for ‘codes of conduct’. Do you agree?

If you do, you’ll be pleased to hear that a solution is just around the corner. I run a site called Poblish.org that aggregates all kinds of political content, creating a central, searchable hub for the output of 2000 (and growing) of the most popular and influential bloggers and journalists. In other words, it’s the perfect place to find political bigotry, prejudice, and assertion.

Once a reader has identified an article – or just a section – that they feel needs substantiation, Poblish will guide them through describing their request, passing the request to the original author (by email, or via TheyWorkForYou for MPs), handling their response, asking the reader to review it, adding or subtracting Brownie points as necessary, and recording the results so that other readers and authors can learn from what happened.

Most of the work has already been done to create this system. There’s even an API for accessing the results. The next stage is for bloggers and political representatives to commit to being part of this; for their readers to start flagging assertions, confident that their efforts will be rewarded, and that online politics can improve; and for developers and the political data community to help perfect Poblish’s solution.”

About Political Innovation

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own –we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by joining our Google Group, subscribing to the blog RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter and Facebook.

http://sluggerotoole.com/2010/09/14/assertion-flagging-for-less-partisan-prejudiced-blogging/

Visualising political content with Wordle

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I’ve been inspired by Leigh Caldwell‘s Economics Zeitgeist word clouds to hook Poblish up to the wonderful Wordle™.

Now you can visualise any Poblish feed with just a single click.

So, here’s Wordle’s visualisation of our most recent incoming articles from the past two days (click for full-size version).

Here’s the results for a group, e.g. our US Political bloggers (past 4 days of activity)

Some other feeds you can try:

All images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Most read articles from last week

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Here’s a quick list of the most read articles from Poblish over the past week (count in brackets):

I’ll add more statistics to the site when I get the chance.

WordPress plugins: “More like this” from across the blogosphere

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Here’s a first look at Poblish‘s first WordPress plugin.

It looks at the content of the current blog post, and automatically identifies related content from across all the content hosted at Poblish – currently 216,296 articles from 1,698 working feeds – returning you a list of the most closely matching articles in under a second.

You can click the name of any blogger or blog to see their live feed (pictured) in a Facebook-style popup frame.

In fact, forget about the screenshot, because you can see the plugin installed on this very blog – just look at the foot of this post, and scroll forward and back through our other posts.

The plugin is stable, but needs to be packaged-up a little so it fits seamlessly into the WordPress world. If you’re impatient to try it out, though, drop me a line and I’ll let you know the two or three steps you need to follow.

Let me know if you have any ideas of your own for developing the plugin. Some of mine are:

  • Ignoring matches from your own blog.
  • Restricting matches by date.
  • Restricting to matches with the same set of tags as the current post – somewhat influenced by Last.fm Radio.