Daily Archives: February 15, 2010

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.

Google Reader integration: share your feeds

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All Feed boxes within Poblish now feature a “Subscribe with Google Reader” button.

So, straight away, you can subscribe to:

  • A feed of all activity on Poblish.
  • A feed of all activity for those Actors, Blogs/Feeds, and Groups you follow.
  • A feed for activity for any Actor, Blog/Feed, or Group you choose.
  • A feed of all recent activity (Flags, Favourites, Ratings, Group creations, etc.) on Poblish.
  • Content-tracking feeds, like the one illustrated.

Poblish is all about open data, and interoperability: making it as easy as possible for you to use the content we host, to share it, work with it, build upon it, and to recombine it in new and interesting ways.

I’m currently looking into how we can best use Google Buzz to help us in that mission, as well as finishing the work on our Custom Feeds facility, which will let you build your own combined feeds: some Actors, some Blogs, some content, all your flags and favourites, and so on.