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A rollup is an automated blog that aggregates (rolls up) a number of different sources. Using RSS feeds you can create your own rollup for any topic.

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Jessica asks:

I guess my whole thing with the rating system is that I don't
understand what Shimon thinks it will add to the Frassle community. I
don't understand what I would get out of rating someone else's blog
posts. I don't understand what someone would get by looking at my
ratings. I don't understand why my blog has to be rated by its readers.

I wasn't talking about just rating blog posts of other frassle users. One of the ideas that I started with when making frassle is that you could look at what URLs people link to, and how they categorize them, and use that information to classify those URLs. Frassle does indeed keep track of when different people categorize the same things, and uses this information to track correlation between categories. You can see these relationships in the outline view.

Why do you categorize things in frassle? I do it because I like to have my writings and my links organized. I'd like to be able to go back to my blog and find out everything I've written about Google. Because of frassle's correlation-tracking technique, I can also leverage those categorizations I've already made to get Google-related news from other blogs. (This system still has some bugs, is slow as dirt, and the interface stinks, but these are getting fixed and I believe in the concept.)

Well, a rating is just another kind of categorization. I have categories for things that are great, good, average, poor, and bad. If, for example, you and I have totally opposite tastes, then frassle will learn that things you call "bad" are related to my "good" category. The hope is that by using this sort of information, I can prioritize items by quality and skip over the deluge of stuff I won't like anyway.

A final note—I think I've set aside my quest for a frassle reputation system. By reputation system I mean something that measures an individual's reputation in a community, like eBay's reputation measure. In eBay, that measure provides an accurate way to judge whether someone you're considering doing business with is trustworthy. It also gives sellers an incentive to behave well, because a better reputation makes buyers more comfortable. I had speculated about whether something like this might make sense for frassle, but I don't currently see how it could work.

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Why organisations need some structure to ensure they are democratic

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Thanks for the bug reports, Jessica. FYI, it is possible to unsubscribe from a feed— just remove it from all categories, and it won't show up in your aggregator.

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Local video blogger Steve Garfield, who will be "a guy with a videocamera" at the DNC next week, was featured on Fox 25 news. Watch the excellent report.

I'm at the blog meetup at Marche Movenpick in downtown Boston. About half the people have their laptops out, while the more sociable half is, well, socializing. This is my token blog post.

If you've been using a desktop RSS aggregator, you know how great it feels to find an RSS feed for a site you frequent. Suppose there's a certain club you like, and you want to know who's playing there most weekends. You could check the site each week, but it'd be much simpler if your aggregator simply showed you whenever a new event was published.

You could ask them to publish a feed. That would be the ideal solution, but it's not likely to happen. Most people still don't know what a feed is good for. If the publisher can't provide a feed on their own, you can use a tool called a scraper to automatically turn their web pages into an RSS feed. One such scraper is MyRSS, which claims to allow non-programmers to easily scrape any web page. I used MyRSS once, and not only did it have an annoying advertising model, but the feed it produced was terrible. It contained only some of the titles, mistook links on the side of the page for new content, and failed to update when new content arrived. In short, it just didn't work.

It's hard to blame MyRSS for this. People don't format their pages to make them simple for a computer to scrape. People format pages for other people to read. A scraper that works only by automatic means, without guidance from a person, is doomed to fail somewhere.

I'd like to propose an alternative. Instead of hoping to make the software smart enough to figure out any page on its own, let's make software that's good at listening to people. Setting up a scraper for your favorite page should be an interactive process.

First, you enter a URL. The first thing the scraper does is fetch that URL and show it to you. To make things challenging, let's suppose you want to scrape Boston.com's event listing for today, which includes event date and event location in addition to some standard RSS fields.

Second, the scraper shows you the page, but marked clearly to show what fields would be scraped. This gives you an opportunity to look at specific examples and correct the scraper before it begins the long cycle of producing beautiful scraped RSS feeds. It might look like this:

All the fields to be scraped are identified by colored borders. Pink indicates event date, green is title, and blue is the list of categories.

The yellow block at the left of each field indicates that this is a guess by the scraper. To confirm the scraper's guess, you click the yellow block and it turns into a green check-mark, as illustrated on the first date. To remove an incorrect guess, you click the red X at right.

At each correction, the scraper adjusts what it looks for before and after each field. The scraper may also want to let the user correct other values, like the total number of items currently on the page. That way the scraper could make sure it is being flexible enough to notice all the relevant stuff on the page, but not so flexible that it picks up garbage.

The best part about this design, in my not-so-humble opinion, is that it's doable. All you need to do is inject a few <span>s and images into the existing web page. If you're making a scraper anyway, you had to have a parser and some ways of guessing what parts of the web page correspond to fields in the feed.

I hope this motivates someone to build a better scraper. We could use one! And if you want my input/assistance on such a project, let me know.

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Hey, just as I was typing that response about frassle bugs, and actually checking off my "bugs" category, a little summer insect landed on my screen. Right next to the "bugs" label in fact. He even stood still long enough for me to take a picture. I hereby christen thee the official frassle bug bug.

Oooh, he just walked a bit! He must like the backlight.

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• The title is a required field.
  This is by design; frassle often displays only the title of a note. It would be possible to default to using the first few words of the body, but requiring the title is not unusual.
• If the title is left empty, an error is displayed and the link and body of the post are not preserved.
  This is a bug.
• In the publisher, if I add a block, and go to advanced style options, then click save, I get a pagekit error
  This is a bug. Fixed.
  
• If I specify a category for a block, then later rename that category through manage categories, the block no longer works correctly — I assume.
  Your assumption is correct and points to an interesting problem. The interactive noteset builder, when ready, will reference categories by ID# rather than by name, avoiding this problem.
• Tree pane does not expand correctly on the post page in firefox when you expand the tree with +s
  Is this a firefox bug? Or can we work around it by setting a width for the div that contains the category tree?
• How do I use more than the ten most recent items in publisher?
  Prepend the noteset expression with something like: !limit=50
• I cannot make any aggregated content from my LJ site appear on the my blog in the publisher
  Fixed in this specific instance. This was an instance of subtle bug having to do with the use of a space at the end of the URI for that feed. To be fixed in future by stripping trailing spaces from URIs.

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In the comments to Philip's post on teenage pregnancy is a link to this wide-ranging article on the consequences of Americans' willingness to move:

The positive aspect of social and geographical mobility is obvious to most Americans: more freedom to choose and more choices. Our society is the envy of the world. Almost every other society on earth wants to imitate us. This is a worldwide social revolution in a way that Communists dreamed of but could not attain through force. But the acids of modernity do eat away at the foundations of every social order, including ours. There are no free lunches in life. There are trade-offs. There are winners and losers. The great losers in America are grandparents. In second place are grandchildren, especially those ages three to ten.