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A simple listing of tagging/folksonomy tools, including big lists of del.icio.us and flickr derivatives.

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Del.icio.us is getting a little less home-brewed. Its founder, Josh Schachter, is taking on some outside investment.

After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and then consume all my waking hours, I've decided to quit my job and work on del.icio.us full time. I've given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment. I've taken this step because it lets me continue to grow del.icio.us while keeping it independent. I am excited to finally be able to devote all of my energy to working on and improving this site, and I'll also be able to acquire some much-needed infrastructure. I'm still in charge of the site and still committed to making it as good as it can be. I think what sets del.icio.us apart is the passion of the community that has organized around it, and I hope I can continue to rely on your ideas, help, and goodwill. Together we have made the site the success it is today.

-j
—
joshua schachter joshua at burri.to http://del.icio.us

I don't think this spells gloom and doom for del.icio.us' hacker ethos. Josh probably knows what made del.icio.us popular and won't trade it away.

I hope. But in any case, del.icio.us would be really easy to replace if things went wrong.

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This new search engine uses the pages bookmarked by users of spurl.net. It's pretty nifty.

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Great idea from this article: use Firefox Live Bookmarks to hold your to read list.

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Peter Caputa linked to this post by Brian Dear suggesting Taggle, a search engine for tags across various folksonomy systems such as del.icio.us and flickr. Philipp Lenssen gave it a shot at Find Forward.

Stringing together this series of ideas and consequences is one of the most rewarding parts of blogging.

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MyStack.com lets you create "Stacks" – like the one you see on the right-hand side of the page. A stack is a list of links, like a blogroll, and can be inserted into a weblog or webpage. Unlike ordinary blogrolls, the list of links in a Stack changes. When you create a stack, you tell us what items you want us to stack for you. When the PubSub system finds new items that match your request, your Stack is immediately updated.

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b2evolution is a feature-rich blogging software package. It has many of the key features of frassle: multi-user, DB-backed, built-in search, posts can be put into multiple categories, etc. It also has many features frassle doesn't: internationalization, draft/private posts, trackback, integrated statistics, and a plug-in architecture.

It looks so good that if I wanted to start a blog today, a blog with the most often used features of frassle, I'd probably use b2evolution or something like it. I mean, it's pretty awesome.

Josh, my housemate and fellow frassle user, has thus reasonably wondered: why am I spending all this time developing my own blog software when there are so many systems out there — that are not only powerful and pretty, but Free and easy to customize?

Hypocrite though Josh is, my first reflex is to defend frassle — it didn't start with the goal of replicating the functionality in typical blogging tools. I built some of it, and I started blogging with it, and so I wanted a lot of those features. But "historical accident" isn't a good excuse. Why not start with an existing tool and write plugins that add frassle-style functionality, like categorization?

My real answer to this does go back to my original motivations for frassle. But it isn't simply that I wanted to develop something unique and inadvertently fell into a commodity market. My original vision was for frassle to be not just a publishing tool, but to allow individual participants in the blogging world to leverage their community in a new way. I saw that a major activity bloggers were doing was pointing at stuff on the internet and responding to it. And I started taking advantage of this by using blogs I trust to find relevant information on various subjects.

Frassle is working toward automating that process. It needs some of the blog tool basics to make that functionality accessible, but it crucially needs a few features that aren't in any other system I know about.

Frassle needs to tightly integrate publishing and reading. Some other tools have aggregator functionality built-in, but frassle bases its entire comments system on aggregation and makes it easy to categorize other peoples' posts. The next important step in this integration is frassle's upcoming support for republishing — actual syndication of content from other sources, assembled using unique tools.

To achieve these features, frassle needs to do some strange stuff. It need to keep everything it aggregates. It needs to have an internal representation of URLs and categories that it can use to track who's talking about what and where they're doing it.

The hope is that it can fit into a unique niche — taking advantage of blogs more than Furl and del.icio.us, but deriving more meaning from the discussion than publishing software alone.

If you're a pessimist, you could say that frassle is in the peculiar position of having blogging features inferior to b2evolution and WordPress, while having linkstacking/shared bookmarking features inferior to Furl and del.icio.us.

But I'm an optimist, so I think there are some very interesting problems in that niche. But I'll admit I need to put my time where my mouth is and focus on what's really crucial for that.

Thanks to Josh and others for prodding me.

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A browsing tool that lets you save and organize thousands of useful web pages in a personal 'web page filing cabinet.'

Moment of fear: has someone beat me to frassle?

Moments of relief: 1. I'm not in it for money, I'm in it to spread the word about weblogs and collaborative internet directories. 2. Furl could be an awesome source of feeds.

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Tool for tracing through blogrolls. Unfortunately it only runs in Radio but it's a cool idea.

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I nearly thought someone had beat me to frassle with this tool. In fact it has a lot of the same features as frassle, but is much more basic. Still very cool though; what frassle would be if I had only 1 hour to program it and wanted to extract the most useful features I could.