The time has come to document Poblish properly, so I’ve made a start. That documentation is hosted on this blog, and a link on the Poblish pages will take you to the right place.

I’m working on Bloggers4Labour-style ‘daily digest’ emails for Poblish, at the moment.

Here’s how they’ll work:

• When you click on the name of any Actor or Group in Poblish, you get a preview window listing their recent activities (e.g. the articles they’ve posted).
• Clicking the ‘Follow’ checkbox adds them to your ‘Followed’ channel, so you can see their activities on the Poblish home page.
• If you then click the ‘Include in Daily Digest’ checkbox, their activities will be listed in a daily email sent to your registered email address.

So, if you want an email, start to follow people and groups. You can un-follow them at any point, by unchecking the ‘Follow’ checkbox.

If you need a list of people and groups you’re currently following, there’s a list on your own Actor page, under the ‘Following…’ tab.

Q. Why not send everyone a digest of everyone’s activity over the past day, then?

A. Well, (a) there’ll be too much activity in future to make this feasible. When we’re aggregating hundreds of articles per hour, you’re unlikely to want to wade through all that on a daily basis. And (b), this gives you the freedom to select exactly what you want, and to toggle emails on and off. It’s so quick and easy to follow people and groups, so why create a brand new, cumbersome interface?

Hopefully this will all be up and running during the next couple of days.

I’ve created a new “Guest User” mode for Poblish. Now, anyone can visit http://www.poblish.org/ and try out the searches, the feeds, the timelines, the visualisations, and read any article, without having to log in. You should also get a nice welcome message to say what the site’s all about.

Of course, if you want to do any of the following:

• Register – and publicise – your own blog(s) and feed(s).
• Contribute to other people’s articles.
• Follow other people, create custom feeds, join groups, and receive daily digest emails.
• Rate, flag, or favourite other people’ contributions.
• Build a reputation as an Editor, by picking out relevant articles for others.
• Integrate with Facebook.

… you will need to log in, but hopefully this is a big step in the right direction, and will encourage more visitors to get involved.

I’m working on making it easier for people to simply look around Poblish. In future you’ll only need to login/connect, and to claim an Actor as your own, if you want to contribute: to rate, follow, submit your own blogs, and so on. Obviously it’s more fun for everyone if you do, but if all you want to do is search, well, that should be open to the whole world. After all, ‘Open Data’ is what we’re about.

Hopefully this will all be up and running in the next day or two.

I’ve made a change to speed up loading the ‘Search Articles’ page, removing a delay of as much as 6 seconds. It’s beautifully quick once again.

Further usability improvements are planned for that page, but I thought this was worth passing on.

The formerly rather messy Actor page has been reorganised into a new set of tabs:

• Activity
• Profile – searchable and customisable information about that Actor
• Reputation (not yet implemented)
• Blogs and Feeds – register your blog here, and any feeds you contribute to
• Groups – that you’re a member of
• Following… – people you follow
• Visual Timeline 1
• Visual Timeline 2

Things are certainly a lot cleaner and tidier now, and it’s clearer what functionality we provide. Hope it improves the overall experience!

You’ll notice that a new search box now appears in the top-right corner of every page. Type something in and Poblish will find it: a piece of a blog post, a name – whatever.

Facebook-style, the results of the search will be grouped by Article, Actor, and Group – with a different tab for each.

I hope you’ll agree that this makes finding things – especially other Actors – a lot easier.

Just a quick update to let you know how things are advancing:

* Collaborative Editing

With Poblish, every post becomes a Wiki page in its own right, and the distinction between the two will collapse. Other actors will be able to contribute amendments, which in turn can be amended by others. Visitors will be able to see not only the original post, but the most active and highly rated version, alongside older/lesser versions.
This isn’t complete yet (see screenshots for the latest), but should be ready to use within a week.

* Feeds / Channels

Poblish isn’t merely a debate-oriented aggregator, it’s a political blogging platform. We provide user-/group-/and article-based data feeds with a view to creating an ecosystem of political tools and applications, e.g. WordPress plugins. You can see these working already on your Poblish home page.

* Editors

Over time, Poblish users will gain an audience – and a reputation – by flagging interesting articles, and ones relevant to their expertise. As an ‘Editor’, with a Channel (see above) that others can subscribe to, the system will credit you for the quality and popularity of your selections (see below).

* Reputation

I’m currently working on an algorithm for allocating actors ‘reputation’ points. These will be awarded (at the very least) on the basis of: the ratings given to their own articles, to new versions of other people’s articles, and responses to articles they have flagged or marked as a favourite. Interactions with other actors will reflect those actors’ own reputation scores. Thus we’ll end up with a system where high quality is strongly rewarded, and low quality is swiftly discredited, but where all reputations can be repaired over time.

Anyway, that should be enough for now.

All ideas and criticisms welcome – get in touch, or create a Discussion here. Please also spread the word about this project, and invite others to join this group.

A warm welcome to all newcomers!

Just a reminder to try out the demo if you haven’t already, at: http://www.poblish.org/

It won’t be fast until I can get the support I need to be able to host it properly, but it should be good enough for now. I’m continuing to work on the site (and the underlying ideas) more-or-less full-time, so it continues to develop and improve. If you haven’t looked recently, please do, as I might well have addressed your concerns.

Although searching and visualisation works very well, there’s not a great deal of *interactivity* at the moment, which is why I’ll discussing, next week, how to add collaborative editing (replacing the standard ‘comment-box’ approach), how to rate those contributions, and how users can build up a ‘reputation’ score.

Incidentally, here’s a quick list of site capabilities you might not be aware of:

* Flags & Favourites: flag-up articles to start a new debate and involve others.
* Feeds will be made available for each element of the site (Actor, Feed, Blog, Article [including revisions], Group, Jurisdiction) in a variety of formats, which should be especially useful to other site developers. A new ecosystem of political/debate-related tools can be created.
* Locale-aware (multi-language)
* Multi-jurisdictional

All ideas and criticisms welcome – get in touch, or create a Debate here.

Hi all,

Just a reminder to try out the demo if you haven’t already. It’s here: http://88.208.207.94:9080/poblish2/

It won’t be fast until I can get the support I need to be able to host it properly, but it should be good enough for now.

There are currently over 13000 articles, from those of you who have signed up, plus a few others from the international blogosphere.

Thought I’d also say a few more words about the motivation for this project. The main reason is to inspire you lot to help me bring it to fruition!

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Bloggers4Labour showed, way back in 2005, that blog-aggregation allowed a kind of community of fairly like-minded bloggers to be brought together from nothing. While it created hundreds of links, friendships, and opportunities to challenge or support one another, the challenge has always been to extend this across the international political blogosphere.

There you’ll find many significant ideological, traditional, and perhaps ‘cultural’ disagreements. Many of these coincide with the boundaries of existing political parties, but many overlap. Just as within the UK Labour blogosphere, collaboration, scrutiny, and honesty can create new links, new ideas, and new agreements.

Bloggers are accustomed to blogging ‘in the dark’, unsure of who – if anyone – might be reading. While firing off posts into the ether can be cathartic, my experience tells me that bloggers want to be engaged in a greater debate, one not restricted by their own band of supporters, and the inevitable trolls. Furthermore, while party affiliations are strong in many, they’re not always limiting. Nor should they be – there is an international market for ideas, one dominated by think-tanks, journalists, etc. and from which bloggers are largely excluded. Certainly the best ones, anyway.

My suspicion is that, while many political bloggers are satisfied by a feeling that they’re serving a higher purpose, expectations of what can be achieved are very low. Expectations of what blogging software – which has barely developed in years, and is frequently crude and restrictive – can do to help political bloggers are also modest. There’s no need to accept this status-quo.

What I’m trying to show with ‘P2′ is that both connectedness and collaboration are easy, not to mention rewarding. The political blogosphere really can be brought to your doorstep; and once this becomes obvious, engaging posts start to become more exciting than narrow ones. The broken and dissatisfying world of blog comments can be replaced with something exciting and constructive.

The more blogging can move on from the ‘celebrity’ and ‘attack’ bloggers, and the more it can detach itself from the ‘churnalistic’ teats of BBC News and the online newspapers, its reputation and influence will rise, as will its responsibility.

Scrutiny of politicians – and indeed every ‘actor’ who inhabits the political world – also becomes more honest and coherent when it becomes possible to follow their actions, collected from multiple sources into a single timeline. Think of this as TheyWorkForYou (our inspiration), but extended to include all political bloggers.