The digest emails I referred-to last week are now here and ready for you.

If you’d like a daily summary, visit Poblish and simply follow a user or group you like, then click to say you’d like their updates in your Daily Digest. Perhaps the “Labour Party (UK)” group (currently comprising 459 bloggers) plus a few selected others?

You’ll see a summary of all members’ activity over the past 24 hours (which works out at about 30 KB at the moment). Currently, emails are HTML only, and arrive just after 9 am (BST), but of course that’ll be configurable before long.

Currently, the content appears sequentially, but naturally there’ll be new grouping options in time.

Here’s a sample.

The time has come to document Poblish properly, so I’ve made a start. That documentation is hosted on this blog, and a link on the Poblish pages will take you to the right place.

I’m working on Bloggers4Labour-style ‘daily digest’ emails for Poblish, at the moment.

Here’s how they’ll work:

• When you click on the name of any Actor or Group in Poblish, you get a preview window listing their recent activities (e.g. the articles they’ve posted).
• Clicking the ‘Follow’ checkbox adds them to your ‘Followed’ channel, so you can see their activities on the Poblish home page.
• If you then click the ‘Include in Daily Digest’ checkbox, their activities will be listed in a daily email sent to your registered email address.

So, if you want an email, start to follow people and groups. You can un-follow them at any point, by unchecking the ‘Follow’ checkbox.

If you need a list of people and groups you’re currently following, there’s a list on your own Actor page, under the ‘Following…’ tab.

Q. Why not send everyone a digest of everyone’s activity over the past day, then?

A. Well, (a) there’ll be too much activity in future to make this feasible. When we’re aggregating hundreds of articles per hour, you’re unlikely to want to wade through all that on a daily basis. And (b), this gives you the freedom to select exactly what you want, and to toggle emails on and off. It’s so quick and easy to follow people and groups, so why create a brand new, cumbersome interface?

Hopefully this will all be up and running during the next couple of days.

I’ve created a new “Guest User” mode for Poblish. Now, anyone can visit http://www.poblish.org/ and try out the searches, the feeds, the timelines, the visualisations, and read any article, without having to log in. You should also get a nice welcome message to say what the site’s all about.

Of course, if you want to do any of the following:

• Register – and publicise – your own blog(s) and feed(s).
• Contribute to other people’s articles.
• Follow other people, create custom feeds, join groups, and receive daily digest emails.
• Rate, flag, or favourite other people’ contributions.
• Build a reputation as an Editor, by picking out relevant articles for others.
• Integrate with Facebook.

… you will need to log in, but hopefully this is a big step in the right direction, and will encourage more visitors to get involved.

I’m working on making it easier for people to simply look around Poblish. In future you’ll only need to login/connect, and to claim an Actor as your own, if you want to contribute: to rate, follow, submit your own blogs, and so on. Obviously it’s more fun for everyone if you do, but if all you want to do is search, well, that should be open to the whole world. After all, ‘Open Data’ is what we’re about.

Hopefully this will all be up and running in the next day or two.

I’ve made a change to speed up loading the ‘Search Articles’ page, removing a delay of as much as 6 seconds. It’s beautifully quick once again.

Further usability improvements are planned for that page, but I thought this was worth passing on.

The formerly rather messy Actor page has been reorganised into a new set of tabs:

• Activity
• Profile – searchable and customisable information about that Actor
• Reputation (not yet implemented)
• Blogs and Feeds – register your blog here, and any feeds you contribute to
• Groups – that you’re a member of
• Following… – people you follow
• Visual Timeline 1
• Visual Timeline 2

Things are certainly a lot cleaner and tidier now, and it’s clearer what functionality we provide. Hope it improves the overall experience!

You’ll notice that a new search box now appears in the top-right corner of every page. Type something in and Poblish will find it: a piece of a blog post, a name – whatever.

Facebook-style, the results of the search will be grouped by Article, Actor, and Group – with a different tab for each.

I hope you’ll agree that this makes finding things – especially other Actors – a lot easier.