Category Archives: Blogging

Better Facebook sharing with Poblish

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All Poblish articles now feature a handy Facebook Share button, with a few new features to make it as easy and satisfying as possible to post interesting content. Firstly:

  • We provide the exact title of the original post – no ‘Poblish’ prefix.
  • We add a preview image, courtesy of BitPixels.
  • We provide a quick preview of the content of the article – or article version – you selected.
  • Facebook will tell you how many times the article has been shared in the past.

Hope you find this useful – I plan to use it more and more, myself. If you fancy having a go, you could try starting here.

When crowdsourcing new policies, don’t waste existing content

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This is the first in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’ that Paul introduced yesterday.

Debategraph

Debategraph: One way of mapping arguments

With all the talk about brand new crowdsourcing platforms, and letting the population ‘speak their minds‘, it’s easy to forget the mass of already-expressed opinion that exists in electronic form, and that can inform future debates. Not only the millions of overtly political blogs, but regular blogs, online newspapers, Wikis, and visual debate-mapping tools, like Debategraph.

Billions of individual thoughts and personal experiences have been written about, from all conceivable perspectives. No policy process is likely to come up with ideas that have never been thought of before; so expressed opinion represents an archive – a knowledge base – that should not be ignored. Here’s why:

  • It already exists – the mental work has already been done.
  • It happened – it’s a record of what happened when particular policies were tried.
  • It’s not just blogs: thanks to TheyWorkForYou, Hansard reports and transcripts of Select Committees make for highly-detailed content.
  • It can be linked-in: it can be dynamically matched, linked, and related to brand new policy debates.
  • It can be made fresh – it can be given a new lease of life when updated collaboratively.
  • It’s as good a source as any – basing arguments in brand new policy debates around what happens to be current in the mainstream media will inevitably produce less diverse, more error-prone, and less extensively scrutinised results than using sources that have already been run past potentially hundreds of human brains.
  • There may be no alternative – it enables, and bootstraps new policy debates, bringing in the words of those who haven’t yet joined – or even heard of – the new platform.

The challenge of using technology to make sense of all this political information is what concerns us now.

My new project – Poblish.org – aims to put this content to use, and to collapse the distinctions between the worlds of blogging, collaborative editing, and debate mapping. The result will be a collaborative ‘open data’ platform that works for both bloggers and policy-makers, and that will nurture an ecosystem of new political data tools. Hopefully the Labour-themed iPhone app Paul mentioned yesterday will be merely the first of these.

I will be explaining more about Poblish in future posts: the particular problems it was designed to address, the questions it tries to answer, and more about how it can improve policy-making.

(Originally posted here, on January 13th, 2010.)

Taking ‘Possibly Related Posts’ to the next level

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Many WordPress bloggers use plugins like these to help people who read their posts find other, related posts.

That’s all well and good if you only want to help readers find your own articles, but perhaps other political bloggers have made your own point better than you have? Let’s now turn that round: perhaps you’ve made another blogger’s point better than he has? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Related Posts service that let people follow links to similar content from one blog to another, irrespective of who wrote it and where you started reading?

Poblish offers just this. Simply open a blog post from one of the 1500 feeds we monitor, and you’ll see a list of similar posts, ranked by similarity, from across all of those feeds.

If that wasn’t cool enough, the list of related posts updates automatically. So, if you create a new, collaborative article with us, you can watch the list update as your work progresses – literally as you type. That’s very useful – perhaps you make a particular point, then some articles appear that strongly refute that point. You might then reconsider, delete your last paragraph, and move on in a different vein.

I believe that tools like this are an essential part of making the political blogosphere a knowledge base, that can not only improve political blogging, but also improve policy-making.

…

(I should add, as an aside, that all these services essentially use Inverse Document Frequency algorithms. Here’s a worked example. They can work very well – Poblish’s especially, I hope, as our algorithm uses stemming and stopwords – but there’s no attempt by the computer to understand the text, or the context, so there will inevitably be howlers. These are not semantic solutions of the type I mentioned yesterday, but don’t worry: we have big plans in that area.)