Frassle by Shimon
At Thursday’s blog group, Shimon demoed Frassle, the new blog program he wrote.
The categorization and hierarchical terms are quite impressive. He and I talked about his categorization ideas a while ago, problems with cataloging the Internet, and coming up with a common vocabulary for doing so. Seeing him program his ideas into this is nifty and exciting. According to his description of it and his demo, it allows people to create a list of categories, or a directory, and interact with other people’s categories and directories. The example he used at the meeting involved receiving an RSS feed from this blog (no, I didn’t know he was going to use my blog as an example and rumors that I slipped him $20 at dinner for doing so are entirely false) of a post with the category (department) RSS Feeds. His system knows to put feeds with that category in his Blogging category. The outline view of his Blogging category shows it. The two feeds going into this category (notice the beautiful hierarchy: one feed is under the category directly, one is under a narrower term) show up without folders, like the other terms have, and indicate with a red line in a white box how close the categories used by the feed matches Shimon’s term.
If I click on the feed from this blog, I see how my blog’s feed appears in his aggregator and notice that some of my categories are posted on the page. If I click on one of them, I see the posts in his aggregator that match the category. Having an aggregator that does something with categories like this–displaying them and routing feeds according to them–is new to me and quite exciting.
Another really cool thing I like about Shimon’s blog is that it allows posts to be in multiple categories. (I’d be able to file this post in Blogging and RSS Feeds, since it has to do with both, instead of only selecting one department.)
The future of blogging and aggregation looks better each day!
