Poblish Blog

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

• What difference does political blogging really make? #wsitp (19)
• Tories charge Slade Green residents £750 for clearing drain (17)
• Beware the zealots selling miracle cures of privatisation – Polly Toynbee (17)
• Natural tobacco (13)
• Welcome to Bloggers4Labour (12)
• Poblish: a new vision for blogging, and content-based policy crowdsourcing (11)
• Wanted: Tony Blair for war crimes. Arrest him and claim your reward – George Monbiot (11)
• Political pluralism, or What do you call a Labour party member? (11)
• Don’t Be Conned: Sam Cam £65 Dress Cost £40,000? (10)
• A memorial for a U-boat in Ireland (10)
• Why I am not a fan of the ‘Robin Hood tax’ (9)
• Poblish: crowdsourcing new policies, and why blogging has to change (8)
• Musings on socialism and lifestylism (8)
• Jew Unites Asian and White Men (7)
• The English Identity (7)
• Fairytales like a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ won’t help anyone (6)
• Is it because the marginals ARE different? (6)
• BUSHWOOD – Villages protest march (6)
• Who do Trade Unions Represent? Part III (6)
• Alba (6)
• No Estuary ‘Island’ – Sign the Petition (6)
• Why don’t you know Richard Quennell? (6)
• The Grifin showdown! (6)
• Education! Education! Education! What chance have our children got? (5)
• DCCC Chairman ? “Democrats will not lose the House in 2010″ (5)
• How to win back voters Labour’s lost (5)
• Business: Stroud: 10 Feb 2010: Written answers and statements (5)
• AFJ i Dwyfor ? (5)
• Poblish: a new blog aggregator (5)
• SHROPSHIRE SCHOOL FUNDING (5)
• In the Shadow of the Barcelona Disputation (5)
• Llanrwst – 30/1/2010 (5)
• The true face of the Tory Party is on show today on Climate Change (5)
• Cymdeithas Cledwyn (5)
• 2010 – Amser am Newid (5)

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

I’ve added the ability for Poblish to automatically republish articles that it aggregates to single, group Twitter feeds – within minutes of publication. The most obvious use is to connect a Twitter account to a Poblish Group; so we currently have:

• @poblishLab – the collective output of 801 UK Labour bloggers.
• @poblishNI – the collective output of 68 political bloggers from Northern Ireland.

For each Tweet we display the original blogger’s Twitter name (else their Poblish username), a summary of their post, a bit.ly link to the original article, plus a group-specific hashtag.

In fact, the facility is flexible enough to allow arbitrary content queries (e.g. all references to ‘Obama’, or ‘Gordon Brown’) to be republished, custom feeds, or arbitrary collections of blogs.

Overall, the aim is to ‘free up’ the political data that Poblish is curating, and get a wider audience for the bloggers that we feature.

It’s not well-enough known that Poblish‘s support for custom groups means that the issue of the missing Conservative Blog Aggregator, that Matt Wardman wrote about last year, has finally been solved, once and for all. Labour bloggers have had one for nearly 5 years.

Clearly this is extremely useful for anyone who’s interested in what UK Conservatives are talking about. So, here’s the Conservative Party group page, where you can watch the live feed. Here’s it is in JSON format, and in RSS 2.0 format.

The group currently contains 527 members, which comprises: all Conservative MPs  (via They Work For You), plus all the bloggers from the Total Politics directory, minus the broken links and the bloggers who weren’t really Tories on closer inspection.

Liberal Democrats shouldn’t feel left out, even though we only have 67 members at present. Here’s their group page, their JSON feed, plus the RSS representation. They do, of course, already have a well-known aggregator of their own.