New Tool – Yahoo Pipes
If you haven’t been following the web-tech circles lately, you may have missed the buzz surrounding Yahoo’s newest RSS tool – Pipes.
Pipes allows you to combine different data feeds, like RSS, into a single output. It’s similar to other feed tools, but the environment is all web based, with an interface that’s similar to visual programming applications. What makes this tool a winner though, is the logic behind the operations. You can filter, remix, and mash-up feeds to produce an incredible array of new content types.
While I think this is probably the most sophisticated RSS tool on the market to date, it is also not the easiest to grasp conceptually. For those interested in taking it for a spin, start with Yahoo’s product overview, and move on to these tutorials below:
- Nick Bradbury
- Datamation
- David Rothman (Using Pipes to translate RSS feeds from English to French)
- Mr. Speaker
What can we do, say, with publisher RSS feeds? Can we combine them and then spit out different feeds by topic to help with current awareness and collection development? What else, what else??
Yes, but we could do that before with FeedRinse, FeedDigest or the like.
Where Pipes is more powerful (and I’m only touching the surface here), is the ability to pair contextually similar content, and mash them together for a more complex (and sometimes unique) output.
Imagine taking 5 or 10 publisher feeds, mixing them together, and then sorting them against technorati blog mentions (or some other kind of citation criteria). The output could be then re-ordered displaying a weighted ‘top new releases list’.
….or feed them into some sort of Google group or chat forum so that a discussion can be created for each title…. or….