Yahoo! has just released a beta version of an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator called Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/). It allows researchers and librarians to “remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor.” Users can retrieve multiple feeds, reorder them, pass them through a content analysis tool, and RSS the final results to themselves or other users. Here is an example of how Pipes works:
- A Pipe takes the New York Times homepage, passes it thru Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr. The results are then displayed and can be subscribed to as RSS. Here is what this particular pipe looks like:
Pipes can easily be configured to aggregate news sources or blogs on particular topics and then deliver the results into a new, single RSS feed. Pipes technology would be of special interest to those researchers who want to keep tabs on the latest developments in their field. It will undoubtedly attract political scientists, reporters, IT experts, media watchdogs, investors looking for the latest information on a company–to mention but a few. Also, as more and more electronic databases and news sources provide integrated alert and RSS tools, Pipe technology could be applied to aggregate results from multiple e-resources and deliver them to users.
