My friend Andrew Regan contacted me after reading a recent post here in which I said that I’d like to be able to link to a good essay entitled ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.’
Andrew Regan
He’s kindly offered to write it – in an extended serialised form – as part of an exploration of Poblish -his latest project.
I first got to know Andrew after he developed the Bloggers4Labour platform. The website is now defunct but it lives on in his new iPhone application which you can download free-of-charge from this iTunes link.
B4L was a rare example of Labour being ahead of the blogging game. Andrew built up a strong community of Labour-leaning bloggers who were using his website to assemble a good feed with a recommendation system built in.
His new platform – Poblish – takes what he learned doing B4L and builds upon it. Firstly, it isn’t as allergic to non-Labour blogs as B4L was – it’s a non-partisan tool that deep-mines blog content and allows users to build their own feeds – allowing users to extract value from blog content by aggregating and mapping posts in new innovative ways.
Andrew wants to make the better blog-posts more accessible over a longer period of time – to ensure that they actually go somewhere rather becoming the fishwrap that they are within a week of publication.
I won’t say any more about it now, but please look out for Andrew’s posts over the next few weeks. He’s keen to encourage people to use it and give him feedback – not just on the usability and functionality of the site, but on the thinking about democracy that underpins it.
All of his posts will all have ‘Poblish‘ as a category – which you can probably drag into a feed-reader in some way (Andrew?)
