A few weeks ago, John Thompson, the publisher of Journalism.co.uk (and a nice bloke) emailed to let me know that this blog would be included in a mash-up of journalism blogs he was creating using Yahoo Pipes.
For those who aren’t acquinted with Yahoo Pipes, it basically allows you to do all sorts of interesting things taking by aggregating feeds and applying keywords (or other user defined criteria) to them before then exporting the whole shabang as a single feed. So, for example, you could mashup all the RSS feeds from a list of two hundred blogs about football, apply some rules, for instance you don’t want anything about Manchester United but you do want Arsenal and Chelsea, then set the feed up to publish somewhere else (or just subscribe to it).
Sounds complicated, which is exactly why, having looked at Yahoo Pipes when it was first launched, I ran like a scared puppy from all it’s RSS aggregation mashup filtered goodness. Thankfully, John gave it a whirl and has now posted a complete yahoo pipes how-to with screenshots. This is incredibly useful stuff.
Great, thanks for the heads up on the tutorial! I’ve been playing with pipes as a a way of making openlearn’s open educational resources available – you can find the pipes here http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/person.info?eyuid=Itz8kPo5oW0hvU9LRi.4Ew–
You can see I need the tutorial!