Frassle Unveiled

Last night at the Berkman
Thursday night
meeting we had the pleasure of watching Shimon
Rura and Josh
Ain demo
Frassle, their next generation blogging tool and personal content management
system. It ambitious aim is to create a highly configurable back
end which the user can set up however they like in order to manage
multiple blogs, juggle feeds, store information and find other information
sources
related to those already in your categories.

One nice feature is the built-in aggregator which allows
you to not only subscribe to and read feeds, but to easily categorize
interesting articles and postings which appear, which in effect files
them in your taxonomy where they can be recalled later (they do not cycle
out of your aggregator and disappear forever) and where they can be used
to find blogs and feeds with content or links similar to those you have
tagged.

It is clearly a work in progess, and needs
some work on the User Interface as well as additional functionality, like the ability
to handle information in more formats (currently text only). We also
question the wisdom of settling on a name which rhymes with hassle, wrassle
and tassle, although they could go with the tag line “Frassle – no Hassle”. But we liked what we saw, and as soon as the boys incorporate
graphics capability
we are ready to give it a try as the composing and managing environment
for the Dowbrigade News.

Meanwhile, Josh and Shimon leave today for Europe, where
they will unveil Frassle at the Open-Source
Content Management Conference at 10:15am on Friday, October
1 at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. Good luck, guys. Remember us when you’re
rich and famous.