A Fully Personalized View Of The Internet: Frassle

Frassle is yet another tool that tries to leverage the many opportunities created by the information overload. The collective abilities generated by the efforts of thousands of individual selfish explorers cataloguing the network according to their personal viewpoint is nothing short of marvellous.

It provides a collective filtering and republishing mechanism which showcases the myriad wonderful ways in which the network is starting to organize itself. Frassle is a new kind of information system that leverages the unique tastes and opinions of many individuals to help you manage information overload. Frassle builds on important ideas from weblogs, aggregators, social networks, and search engines.

The dream behind frassle is a fully personalized view of the internet. Frassle doesn't make intelligent decisions for you, but it uses information you provide to learn, over time, what's important to you.

It helps you to organize things you find on the net.

Best of all, frassle doesn't need lots of care and feeding--if you write a blog or keep bookmarks in your web browser, you're already producing all the information frassle needs.

Frassle is a Personalized Directory. When you visit Amazon.com, you see a store that has been adapted to your interests based on what you've purchased and rated in the past. Frassle generalizes systems like Amazon and collaborative spam filtering to address content from all over the Web.

To put Frassle to work what you do is you start making a directory of links on the Internet, something that has a structure like Yahoo or the Google directory but with whatever categories make sense to you. You also subscribe to the directories of other people so when I put a new link in my directory, you get notified and you put it somewhere that it makes sense for you in your directory.

From this Frassle infers a relationship between some of my categories and some of yours. Over time the relationships get more accurate, so when *I* find something and classify it, a pretty accurate classification can be determined on *your* system and the second part of the idea is that in addition to giving out my classifications, I also give out info about how my categories relate to others' categories."

Frassle empowers the individual on any type of computer create a hirerachy of theme/topics into which selected RSS newsfeeds can be easily aggregated along with links to online resources and your own blog posts.

All in one place: Blog, aggregator, directory, search engine, advisor.

"I can't singlehandedly read much of what's on the Internet, but if my friends and their friends all chip in, the pool of contributors is greatly increased. If we can compose category relationships between mutltiple people, each extra step links each taxonomy with dozens of others. Rather than just a single person or a group collaboratively developing internet directories, we have a whole social network."