What's New

This update covers a wide spectrum of Jotup features and is intended to bring most of the system backend to production-ready status.

🔎 Discovery

🔎 Search

• search UI:

  • multiple search types added in the search area, incl. for news, organisations, own content and tags

  • search boxes re-arranged

  • explanations added for each field to explain them to the user

  • 'save to Newsfeed' block to save a search as a regularly-running Newsfeed in a Notebook

• search system:

  • added:

    • multibox checker

    • required/optional tags

    • in-text string search

  • autocomplete is now much faster and more precise

• added AI-powered 'Tag Suggester' block to automatically suggest tags to the user

Newsfeeds

• Aggregate news feeds (e.g. on 'My Activity & News' page) now show which individual Newsfeed the news item came from
• Added 'add to favourites' and 'save to notebook' buttons to news items displayed in  Newsfeeds
• Clicking the button again removes the news item from the favourites or the chosen Notebook location, respectively
• AI-based Tag Suggester block and new AJAX-based Newsfeed creation procedure to guide the user in efficiently creating a feed

⚡ Summarisation / Insight

Most tag view pages now feature a 'frequency' chart showing frequency of news / content posted within each week/month. These visualise the distribution of events pertaining to the tag within the time dimension. For example, for Organisation or Stock Symbol tags, a frequency chart provides instant insights about the organisation's activity over time. For Locations tags, the frequency chart could reveal spikes of noteworthy events, or seasonal patterns.

Location tags

• Geotags are now all in uppercase and support UTF-8 encoding for better searching
• Fixed a bug which allocated the wrong vocabulary ID to some geotags, rendering them unusable

Content tags

• Updated to reflect new concepts of spring of 2023 (over 50,000 new tags, including ChatGPT, Omicron COVID variant, etc.)
• 'Related Tags' block with suggestions for linked (although not synonymous, as Jotup always uses 1 main tag for all synonyms) tags

Abstractive summariser

• summary length is now dependent on the original (longer original = slightly longer summary)
• fixed issue with repeating sentences at the end of the summary if the summariser runs out of things to say

News summariser

Major update improving accuracy of news summarised by the platform, as well as adding new features.

• 📣 News can now be generated from web pages, rather than just RSS feeds (which are increasingly on their way out) and various XML news formats the system already receives news from. This enables Jotup to scan many new sources, including many previously uncovered organisations
  • the system automatically determines news page structure and which elements to scan using user inputs
  • it will soon be possible for the user to set up their own news feeds, by scanning either RSS or web pages
• Organisation names are now tags, which can be clicked, leading to organisation profile (see separate update regarding the Organisation and Stock Symbol tag taxonomies)
• Improved the way Location tags are generated - now, in addition to locations supplied by the content provider in via metadata, Jotup also finds locations within the article text, leading to a more comprehensive geotagging
• Where necessary, Jotup can now generate long-form summaries reflecting article structure, just like for Web Summs

Web Summ content type

The Web (Page) Summary content type has been overhauled to be very reliable.

• It can now summarise a wider scope of pages, including many pages under crawl protection.
• In case of failure to either retrieve or summarise a page, it will give better errors.
• Better handling of various encodings and formats

🏢 Lead content type

The 🏢 Lead content type is now self-summarising, just like Web Summ or News content types. The autosummariser can be triggered in 2 ways by the user:

• Inserting a URL in lieu of title during saving will crawl the URL and generate a Lead based on the organisation that is at that URL
• Typing the organisation name into the title field will cause the Lead to be filled in automatically if Jotup already knows that organisation

In either case, Jotup will create a 🏢 Lead profile with the following data:

• description of the organisation
• link to main Organisation page via Organisation tags, if Jotup identifies the organisation as one already listed on Jotup
  • any relevant news pertaining to the organisation, listed in a side panel
  • stock data and basic financials
  • tags pertaining to what the organisation does and locations it operates in

Creating 🏢 Leads and/or 👤 Contacts within Notebooks will enable a Pipeline tab view, which allows the user to interact with the 🏢 Leads, 👤 Contacts, 📅 Events and any related nodes within a more conventional CRM-style view which allows sorting and filtering. There's also a separate People overview tab.

The content type has its own triple backslash (\\\) commands, which have been listed in the \\\ helper block in Outline Designer.

📑 Outline Designer

• Various minor cosmetic changes and bug fixes for Outline Designer
• Fixed buggy move mechanism which previous caused the dragged item to fall into closed branches it was being dragged past
• Added spinning 'in progress' indicator when any manipulation with content is done within Notebooks in Outline view
• Operations taking a long time will additionally display a reassuring 'process still in progress' displaying various live data about the process and server in order to provide reassurance
• Outline Designer can now handle dropped network connections - rather than silently timing out as before, it warns the user about lost connection to the server via visual indicator and resumes the save operation once the connection is re-established. This is useful e.g. when working in a moving setting like a train, or with a mobile internet with poor reception that intermittently drops out.
• Fixed certain Notebook tabs not showing in OD view

🔧 System

• Abstractive text summariser is now a stand-alone server process
• Text summarisers and taggers now have vastly improved request queues, allowing for handling multiple simultaneous requests
• Fonts improved throughout the system.
• Various security fixes & updates to the entire stack
• Completely overhauled antibot / anti-DDOS system, integrating it with leading cloud-based proxy services, resulting in a dramatic reduction in bot traffic and consequent dramatic increase in the amount of simultaneous legitimate visitors the system can support on existing hardware. Suspicious users will have to pass extra AI-based checks rather than getting banned outright as before.

⚡ AI

• Entire new Organisations taxonomy and associated blocks/pages
• Improvements to the Location tagging system - now it works on all news items and augments the locations supplied by news provider
• Metadata extractor for  Lead / Contact content types

🔎 Search & discovery

• Completely overhauled the existing news suggestion algorithms, improving their accuracy
• Fast and accurate autocomplete functionality for all Jotup tag fields
• 'Search & Explore' page added with following tabs:
  • 'News & Research' - explore the ~2m publically-available news items, including almost all English-language corporate news, as well as regulatory information etc. This mirrors the Newsfeed content type, except that it is designed for immediate news lookup. It's possible to instantly save any search as a Newsfeed in any Notebook through the 'Save as Newsfeed' block.
  • 'Tags' - find & explore 2m+ content tags and associated public content summarised by Jotup
  • 'My Stuff' - search through content from the notebooks that you're a member of

📣 News

• Individual news items are now save-able as editable News Copy content type, from either the news item view or from within the Newsfeed
• Various improvements to the 'Activity & News' page
• Newsfeeds:
  • More intuitive UI
  • New 'Tag suggester' block to help the user find the most accurate tags/tag combinations for a given subject
  • Added 'Related tags' block, which shows related tags for further exploration
  • 📰 News items can now be saved / starred (as well as deleted/un-starred) directly within the Newsfeed.
  • It is now possible to control whether to monitor own  News Sources

📑 Outline Designer

• Improved stability
• More intuitive menu function
• Improved drag logic
• Tasks show status directly in outline
• Topics are now shown in bold to increase outline legibility/clarity

🖥️ UI

• Fonts now more legible
• Various minor improvements
• Metasummary views for Notebooks, Leads and  Newsfeeds
• 'Frequency' blocks for 📰 News and Organisations pages, displaying time trends (as bar charts) for summarised content

Performance

System performance has been improved despite growing traffic load thanks to a combination of increased anti-bot protection and hardware tuning.

Better update notifications

Repositioning a node within the Outline will now be mark it as updated, and therefore generate update messages. Within table views, e.g. Pipeline, moved nodes will rise towards the top (e.g. when a Lead is moved to a different pipeline stage folder).

Pipeline / CRM

The Pipeline view has been improved:

• Added 2nd 'parent' column - now you can have several sets of Leads with the same kind of pipeline structure.
• Added more sort options
• Added filtering for parent columns
• Parent columns only appear when necessary
   

Jotup, including the news summarisation/discovery system and Jotbot, has been completely switched over to our own tagging system following extensive testing.

The new system not only provides better quality tags, but is also demonstrably more reliable, having suffered 0 news processing-halting errors over the past 14 days, as opposed to 1 every 2 days with the previous system.

Tagging errors/false positives have been drastically reduced to almost 0; there are now several systems, including domain-specific tagging modules, cross-checking the tagger output to ensure quality.

• Improved notification system so that it doesn't issue 'item updated' messages if the item was created within the last half hour because that's probably the user doing the initial edit after creating it in Outline Designer.
• Updated notification system so that it shows revision authors rather than original authors in update messages, and actual deleting user rather than original author in deletion messages.
• Fixed issue with summaries appearing with superfluous characters e.g. \n
• Fixed 'Content added' messages not being created since mid-May

👤 Contact is the missing link between a 🏢 Lead and 📅 Event - it represents someone within the organisation.

The envisaged workflow is thus: make a Lead and the under it create several Contacts, and under each Contact add Events as they arise.

In a situation where there are several Contacts involved in one Event, either:

• post the Event under the most significant contact (e.g. the one that's in the From: vs CC: field in the email) and then reference the rest in the 'Participating Contacts' field within the Event
• post the event directly under the Lead or wherever you'd like (not under any Contact), and then reference all the contacts in the Participating Contacts field

The main Contact as well as any additional participants will be shown in the Pipeline view. Any relationship between Lead (News Source), Contacts, and Events will be visuall shown (by hierarchical offsets, just like Outline Designer).

📅 Event is basically Note, but for anything that's happened (or will happen, whatever) that's got some kind of time element to it.

Event was made because It just sort of felt weird having all those Notes in Sources notebook; Note is more for thoughts/short bits of random info, rather than CRM-style action happennings.

Event also:

• provides visual distinction within the notes -- you can tell it's something fairly important and with a temporal element
• interacts with News Source / Lead by appearing within News Source / Lead as a CRM-style action (i.e. Jotup automatically pulls all children of a News Source / Lead and lists them within N.S./Lead
• Appears within Pipeline view (NB: together with Tasks) so you can tell what's going on a lot better now
• appears in the calendar system
• (in future) could be synced with your external calendar

major overhaul of the Relevance Engine - the system that connects the user with relevant content. In addition to ensuring a cap on the number of daily news items sent, it also now watches for this happenning persistently and takes action in 2 ways:

1. if the number of matching news items during that particular run exceeds the limits for the newsfeed (i.e. it's set as max 5 items per run and it found 10, so top 5 are sent and 5 not sent), it gives you a notice
   

2. if this keeps happening over 2 consecutive days, the Relevance Engine will decide that your experience is being impacted and you'll then start getting this message once a day:
   

• Renamed various pages to make more sense in context of the ecosystem (e.g. 'Available Jotup Features -> Features & Subscriptions)
• added 'Tools' section to Features & Subscriptions

Every hour, news will now arrive into channels all at once rather than as individual news items spaced fractions of a second apart. This eliminates the endless staccato of notification clicks on the hour (Slack will still click, but once per channel rather than for every arriving news item).

System will attempt to put as many news items into 1 message as possible, so that the amount of notifications the user receives when news arrive is dramatically minimised:

• Items without interactive buttons will be grouped and arrive as 1 message
• Items with interactive buttons (e.g. AFP news in Jotbot Open Demo) will still arrive as  individual messages
• Where at the same there are items with and without buttons (e.g.  press releases and AFP news in Jotbot Open Demo arriving into a channel at the same time), news without buttons will be grouped into 1 message and then followed by news with buttons as individual messages. This additionally gives items with buttons more prominence.

The net effect should be a drastic/considerable reduction in notification pings.

• subscription management/overview available via /jotbot subscriptions - this provides an overview of all subscriptions active and/or available
• buttons/status indication within individual news items. Depending on whether a subscription is active or availble this either gives subscription status or action buttons to gain access either via PAYR or Subscription