Yahoo Pipes (and a nice tutorial)
Yahoo Pipes, a free service that remixes feeds and other data using a visual editor, is a great way to remix content without having to know any coding languages (an ever-increasing value-added component for any service). Here’s a Library 2.0 pipe as an example.
Mr. Speaker has written a very nice tutorial on how to use Yahoo Pipes. It’s well-organized and quite valuable…especially since Yahoo doesn’t even provide any tutorials on how to use them!
I haven’t really found mash-ups of data like this that useful….Squidoo lenses and such. Perhaps someone can convince me why these are better than other things, like RSS aggregator accounts, let’s say. I dunno…I just haven’t found a real use for these things yet, and I feel like a techie poser because of it. I feel like I should find them useful. It’s kind of like when you’re at the modern art museum and you’re looking at some piece of art, thinking "I should like this,it’s in a museum after all" but knowing in your heart of hearts that you don’t. So what’s wrong with me?
found via A Feed is Born
February 14th, 2007 at 4:30 am
Actually, Squidoo isn’t a mashup at all. It’s just an easy-to-edit, static web page where one can post links to other web pages along a common theme. It’s usefulness is really determined by it’s author’s judgment. I thought it wasn’t really an innovation or especially useful.
What I find impressive about pipes is that it allows users to make fairly sophisticated automated combinations of data from multiple sources (without a lick of programming knowledge) through a fairly intuitive graphical interface.
Here are two somewhat useful applications of Pipes of potential interest to bloggers.
February 14th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Hi there, long time reader, first time poster! I actually found a use for Yahoo Pipes last night. I created an email feed from our internal blog for the luddites on staff who will not use RSS. What’s more, I was able to set filters on it to exclude certain posts that already come into the blog via a listserv that we are all subscribed to. Not something that can be done with a normal RSS feed. So there’s one idea…
February 14th, 2007 at 10:43 am
You’re absolutely right, David. Squidoo isn’t a mash-up in the strict definition. I think of it in the same class, though, since it’s combining info from different places into one (kind of like the personalized Google pages).