Yahoo Pipes
Have you heard of Yahoo Pipes? It is a neat little service that’s been around for a while, but I don’t know if many people know it even exists. Yahoo Pipes lets you grab existing data feeds, manipulate them to give you what you want, and then read them on your favorite RSS reader. For example, you could have a RSS feed of every first-edition copy of Atlas Shrugged that appears on eBay or Google Base below $100, or a RSS feed of every time a certain blogger mentions “Seinfeld,” or you can even convert your favorite Spanish blogs into English. Or better yet, you can combine all of these into one big data feed and use it however you want. If you check out the site, I’m sure you will be able to find better examples than the ones I gave.
You don’t have to be a programmer to set up the service, either. You build these datasets by dragging, dropping, and linking objects together. You will have to read the instructions, but for basic use it is not very hard to pick up. But if you are a programmer, you can get your data feed in JSON format for use on practically any web applet you want to write.
Right now, I’m using Yahoo Pipes to consolidate the RSS feeds from bloggers who have introduced themselves on the OBlogger list that started recently. I was introduced to 20 or so bloggers in a matter of a couple weeks, so rather than dump them into my already-bulging RSS reader, I build a Yahoo Pipe that consolidates all of their blogs into one handy feed that I can read at my leisure. If you are interested, you can see the feed for yourself here.
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