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What is syndication for? This piece, by the author of ActiveRenderer for Radio, asks what it will take for blogs to embrace not only reading and writing, but editing and aggregation:

I would argue that weblogging is not only an author's dream, it is (or will soon become) an editor's dream. Most people associate journalism with writing. I've spent enough time in daily newspapers to know that it's only part of the job. Papers would not exist without people whose job it is to organise the available writing material, decide on sequences, hierarchy of information, association with photo or graphic material, and so on.

How would this work? You'd need an RSS aggregator and publisher, something like Feedster's Feedpaper. But you'd also want the ability to structure this in a web page that others could read. And the kicker is, of course, that you want to allow users to design and share their own internet editions without knowing about RSS or anything technical.

Twisting this to my own ends: Frassle seems like the perfect back end for this. What it needs is a customizable front end: the page builder. I want to see the page builder tab just to the right of the aggregator. You have to be logged in to use it. You give your page a name, and it gets a permalink just like a note. You can choose a title and background/text colors (or perhaps a theme). You can choose 1, 2, or 3 columns. Into each column you can stack a number of building blocks.

Each building block is a page element. It can contain

• the text of a note or set of notes, optionally with title, categories, and comment links. Select the set based on a mixture of these criteria:
  • a set of specific notes (by GUID/permalink), or
  • the latest N notes in a certain feed, or
  • notes in a certain category, or
  • notes matching a certain search.
• a list of titles with links and hover text, with selection criteria as above.

Hmm, that seems implementable. In fact, I just sketched out a data model…