Just a quick update to let you know how things are advancing:

* Collaborative Editing

With Poblish, every post becomes a Wiki page in its own right, and the distinction between the two will collapse. Other actors will be able to contribute amendments, which in turn can be amended by others. Visitors will be able to see not only the original post, but the most active and highly rated version, alongside older/lesser versions.
This isn’t complete yet (see screenshots for the latest), but should be ready to use within a week.

* Feeds / Channels

Poblish isn’t merely a debate-oriented aggregator, it’s a political blogging platform. We provide user-/group-/and article-based data feeds with a view to creating an ecosystem of political tools and applications, e.g. WordPress plugins. You can see these working already on your Poblish home page.

* Editors

Over time, Poblish users will gain an audience – and a reputation – by flagging interesting articles, and ones relevant to their expertise. As an ‘Editor’, with a Channel (see above) that others can subscribe to, the system will credit you for the quality and popularity of your selections (see below).

* Reputation

I’m currently working on an algorithm for allocating actors ‘reputation’ points. These will be awarded (at the very least) on the basis of: the ratings given to their own articles, to new versions of other people’s articles, and responses to articles they have flagged or marked as a favourite. Interactions with other actors will reflect those actors’ own reputation scores. Thus we’ll end up with a system where high quality is strongly rewarded, and low quality is swiftly discredited, but where all reputations can be repaired over time.

Anyway, that should be enough for now.

All ideas and criticisms welcome – get in touch, or create a Discussion here. Please also spread the word about this project, and invite others to join this group.

A warm welcome to all newcomers!

Just a reminder to try out the demo if you haven’t already, at: http://www.poblish.org/

It won’t be fast until I can get the support I need to be able to host it properly, but it should be good enough for now. I’m continuing to work on the site (and the underlying ideas) more-or-less full-time, so it continues to develop and improve. If you haven’t looked recently, please do, as I might well have addressed your concerns.

Although searching and visualisation works very well, there’s not a great deal of *interactivity* at the moment, which is why I’ll discussing, next week, how to add collaborative editing (replacing the standard ‘comment-box’ approach), how to rate those contributions, and how users can build up a ‘reputation’ score.

Incidentally, here’s a quick list of site capabilities you might not be aware of:

* Flags & Favourites: flag-up articles to start a new debate and involve others.
* Feeds will be made available for each element of the site (Actor, Feed, Blog, Article [including revisions], Group, Jurisdiction) in a variety of formats, which should be especially useful to other site developers. A new ecosystem of political/debate-related tools can be created.
* Locale-aware (multi-language)
* Multi-jurisdictional

All ideas and criticisms welcome – get in touch, or create a Debate here.