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.

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(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.)