Category Archives: Twitter

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.

Usability improvements

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A quick list of recent usability improvements:

  • We now record a “number of times read” count for each article, as well as totals for each blog / blogger1, which you can see in the sidebar of the article page.
  • All articles now feature a Twitter sharing widget, to go with the one we added for Facebook sharing.
  • We now display links within the content of articles, rather than stripping them out. Command-click (Mac) or control-click (Windows) to open the link target in a new window.

1 If you’re curious, we count reads from logged-in users, guest users, and search engines. However, an article’s read count only goes up by one per browser session, so refreshing has no effect on the total. Finally, we don’t count reads from the article’s own author – or, if the article came from a Group blog – from any of the authors registered as contributors. In short, you can be confident that the read counts are genuine.

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.