j's scratchpad

In a not-so-public forum today, Shimon Rura wrote about a potential market for Frassle being in environments with smaller, closed networks. I accidentally began blogging on Frassle in February and have been contributing ever since. I can definitely see the value of having Frassle on an intranet. With many of its current features, like threaded comments and linking related posts, it can contribute to collaborative environments. Its fantastic system for hierarchical, customizable categories allows for organized knowledge management and, theoretically, easy retrieval. The built-in search engine helps a lot, too. The aggregator component is something many other blog systems don’t offer. The ability to categorize incoming feeds is quite unique and adds to Frassle’s superiority as a system to store and retrieve a variety of blog posts. The Frassle publisher, a component he released recently, makes Frassle even more powerful.

If I was using Frassle on an intranet, here are some of the things I could do with it:

• Instead of e-mailing clip citations or keeping them in a database inaccessible to key users, I could share and archive them via Frassle.

• A blog could work very well for another set of clips my office produces because contributors wouldn’t necessarily have to know HTML or convert documents to Web pages.
• I could post FYI kinds of items to Frassle, like articles of note, rather than sending them to someone via e-mail where they can easily get eaten by spam filters or lost in an inbox.
• Resource sharing and archiving is much easier using a blog.
• With the publisher, I can create specific pages for some of my clients and move content of note onto those pages for them. Because of Frassle’s archiving abilities, someone can find something I posted last week or three months ago. Since Frassle automatically creates feeds, someone could get that information in an aggregator instead of visiting the Web page to look for the lastest update(s).

Actually, with the publisher, it could almost be possible to use Frassle as the entire intranet.

Some of the limitations:

• There’s no component for uploading and sharing files or photos. My office would absolutely need something like that. Integrating a content management component into Frassle could be incredibly sweet, but perhaps way too much work for Shimon.

• User documentation is lacking right now. Certain people who would like to have their own blog might find the system too difficult to use and I won’t mention the struggles of setting up the publisher. It would require someone in the office knowing the system very well and being able to provide training and tech support.
• People might want to prevent people from seeing some of their posts, but Frassle doesn’t currently offer any sort of privacy options, unless someone is only directing people to his/her publisher.
• Several people contributing to one blog could be probelmatic because there is no good multiple login option; everyone has the same editorial privileges; and there’s no automatic byline.
• I’d want something more sophisticated than the current ways of indicating what’s related. Having something like TrackBack that counts links within the body of the post could be very useful.

Note: The Yahoo! Group berkman-thursday might be restricted to group members.

Addendum 8/20: Thank you, Shimon, for responding.

Addendum 8/26: Bill Ives of Portals and IM points to this post.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2004 at 1:37 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.