Category Archives: Political Blogging

Poblish app 1.0.2

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The new version of our free, political feed-reading iPhone app has been submitted, and should be ready for download within the next few days.

What’s new? Well, you can access your favourite blogs and topics, and re-run your favourite searches, all with one click, using the new Tagged Feeds feature. Adding new favourites is also just one click!

I’ve also removed Ads from the app, and you should find that recent topic results are more accurate than ever.

Thanks to OpenAmplify for their link to the current version (1.0.1) of the app. Need to get the word out more!

New Article features

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Poblish has always provided a “more articles like this” facility for every article on the system – not just related articles from that blog or Twitter feed, but related articles from all blogs and Twitter feeds. This list used to appear next to each article, crammed into a column that was always just a little too narrow to make the list truly usable, so I’ve moved it to a new screen which you can pop up using the big “Explore…” button.Explore button

We’ve also restored the “Similar Bloggers” facility and put it alongside the list of articles, to help you explore other bloggers who deal with similar themes. Finally, if you’re logged-in, you’ll find your own individual list of recommended articles. This uses the latest collaborative filtering techniques to suggest a list of articles based on your own ratings, flags, favourites, as well as those of people with tastes similar to your own.

Above the Explore button, you’ll see what looks like a “tag cloud” for the article. However, what you’re seeing is much cleverer than what 99% of other applications offer. We use semantic analysis to determine the article’s key themes, or “Zones“, rather than simply relying on the categories the blogger chose; we rank them according to how often they have been mentioned during the past 24 hours; and we provide a link to the Zone’s home page, where you can see – and follow – a feed of matching articles.

The point of all this is to seamless weave articles – whether blog posts or Twitter posts – into the greater and wider world of political content, using state-of-the-art techniques, and to make it easier than ever for people to explore and to learn.

Firefox search plugin for Poblish

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Poblish now supports OpenSearch, which means that when visiting the site using Firefox (and possibly other browsers, apparently including Internet Explorer 7 and later), a menu item named “Add Poblish Search” appears in the search engines menu of your browser toolbar.

Once selected, a new Poblish search engine appears in your toolbar’s menu, like so.

This gives you the ability to search Poblish from any other site. Find something political you’re interested in? A person, a place, or a policy? Type them in the box wherever you see our icon, and hit return. Something like this will soon appear:

Poblish inspirations: problems with blogging

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Sorry for the navel-gazing, but I thought I’d repost this brain-dump of mine, from April 2009, which currently exists only as a Facebook note. It’s interesting in a way, because it put me on the path to discovering Debategraph, and to using many of the ideas in formulating Poblish in June and July 2009 (here‘s what I boiled down – and developed – the ideas into).

Problems with blogging:

Reading and writing are easy; listening, comprehending, adapting, and acting are optional, and hard.
Quality and ‘level of thought’ are independent.
Disembodied, fragmentary, duplicated, rhetorical, inconsistent.
Arguments die out, rather than resolve. Boredom? Multiple ‘roots’ to the solution?
Current blog-commenting methodology has identical problems. That’s why it’s dissatisfying for bloggers, and often unhelpful, policy-wise.

Who learns? Who wins the argument, and how? Sheer weight of numbers on one side? ConservativeHome will choose differently from LabourHome, come what may. Best argument might win, but perhaps only best on its own terms?

Against partisanship? Probably. Against ideology? Not necessarily.

We want policy made, actions taken, but where’s the connection between our words, our arguments, our agreements, and implementation – nationally, or far closer to home. A binding contract for politicians? Gap between entering into a debate and taking responsibility/ paying for implementation is the ‘irresponsibility’ gap that plagues online debate, and the alienation gap for casual politicos.

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Imagine a network/tree of arguments (agreements?), evidence, and contexts/environments. How can these be seen as a network – visually. Can every argument be reduced to this format, to political concepts/’atoms’, and plotted? Could this be done by volunteers, or via an algorithm? A manual mapping project? People do this every time they comment on, or respond to an argument, but the decentralisation / duplication of blogs, and use of the English language, means that ‘revelations’ can be missed.

Why a network, or tree? Because all ‘successful’ arguments – leaves/nodes on the tree – must be consistent with one another / branched to another.

Can this technique identify logical inconsistencies, stripping them out? And deliberate misdirection?

Surely we will have an infinity of trees (‘policy spaces’?), each one based around irreducible, mutually inconsistent ‘atoms’, but as the society / polity decides upon its atoms, the number of possible ‘policy-spaces’ reduces until one remains, and a fully consistent policy-map remains.

This might partly be how policy is currently made, and definitely how it’s implemented, but all this goes on behind closed doors.

Only a temporary equilibrium: any ‘fact’ or argument could break it.

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‘Evidence’: how can this be weighed against (any consistent) argument without an external ‘value’ system. Well, how is it now?

The key points for me are, still:

  • Reading and writing are easy; listening, comprehending, adapting, and acting are optional, and hard.
  • Arguments die out, rather than resolve.
  • Gap between entering into a debate and taking responsibility/ paying for implementation is the ‘irresponsibility’ gap that plagues online debate [...]

I’m not sure why there’s been so little interest in addressing these problems. Actually, no, I’m pretty sure I do know why, but aren’t the consequences of not dealing with them obvious enough?

Visualising political content with Wordle

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I’ve been inspired by Leigh Caldwell‘s Economics Zeitgeist word clouds to hook Poblish up to the wonderful Wordle™.

Now you can visualise any Poblish feed with just a single click.

So, here’s Wordle’s visualisation of our most recent incoming articles from the past two days (click for full-size version).

Here’s the results for a group, e.g. our US Political bloggers (past 4 days of activity)

Some other feeds you can try:

All images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Most read articles from last week

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

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

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.

Poblish and the Semantic Web: progress so far

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I mentioned last month that Poblish has been using OpenAmplify‘s semantic/sentiment analysis service to give technology a shot at making sense of the vast sea of content that is the political blogosphere, in such a way as to help policymakers make better informed decisions. As I’ve said before:

Billions of individual thoughts and personal experiences have been written about, from all conceivable perspectives. No policy process will come up with ideas that have never been thought of before; so existing content represents a knowledge base that should not be ignored

In my piece at Left Foot Forward, earlier this week, I imagined a future in which such tools could take a source article and use this content to automatically, dynamically identify counter-arguments, hopefully before bad policy is made. Well, we have the content, we know that counter-arguments are out there, some of which may very well not yet have crossed the mainstream media’s horizon, and we hope – and believe – that technology can help us find them.

Only a very small percentage of Poblish’s articles have so far been semantically analysed (OpenAmplify are very kindly letting us evaluate their software for free, so the number of articles we process is limited), but all new articles are – and for those articles that have them, Poblish is now displaying the results in the page’s sidebar. Here are the results for the following article.

The way we display the results is simplistic at best, but essentially what we’re showing are the main topics from the article, divided into their relevant category, and coloured as follows:

  • Blue: favourable references (or “polarity”). Dark blue for wholly positive (never negative), light blue for generally positive (but occasionally negative).
  • Red: unfavourable references. Red for wholly positive (never negative), pink for generally positive (but occasionally negative).
  • Grey: neutral references, or a mixture of positive and negative ones.

Clearly there are successes and failures in the above list. Sunny Hundal‘s name appears as a mere noun, rather than a human name (though I wonder if the fact that his surname was misspelled in the original article is relevant here) and some of the polarities seem a little random.

Bear in mind, though, that each set of results you see was the result of an analysis of one, single article, without any context. Give the tool 200,000, however, and we can be certain that insights will start to massively outweigh mistakes. Context is critical, and – just as we don’t judge people or texts on the basis of what we objectively see – semantic applications should not be regarded in isolation, but as part of a vast network of humans and machines, using different techniques to identify and weave links between pieces of information, gradually improving our understanding of them.

All in all, the questions I’m interested in are:

  1. Do we believe semantic analysis can work?
  2. Do we believe that it can reveal insights that it would be impractical for human beings to find?
  3. Do we believe that those insights might be just the ones we need?
  4. Is it worth us investing more in such solutions?

I’d offer a yes to each of those questions, and have had a lot of fun evaluating OpenAmplify, but: what do you think?

Aggregated Twitter feeds: @poblishLab and @poblishNI

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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.