Loosing Site

Information is the lifeblood of any business, but our arteries are clogged with data. Yahoo Pipes gives us a way of turning the data into information and letting it flow.

Yahoo Pipes via kwout

Pipes is a drag and drop programming environment through which you can channel data feeds from public sources like Flickr, YouTube, Google Base, Google News, Yahoo Search or any other source that provides XML or CSV output. Feeds can be automatically analyzed, combined, processed, formatted, sorted and tagged. The output from a feed can be delivered as a list on a web page, a map, an email message or an RSS feed that you can read in your favorite aggregator.

Pipes – Source Modules via kwout

An good example of a practical, business-like Pipe is Jyotirmaya Nanda’s “Financial Headline News by using Company Ticker Symbol”.

Pipes: Financial Headline News by using Company Ticker Symbol (Finance) via kwout

When fed a stock ticker symbol this pipe gathers, filters and sorts related news from Yahoo, Technorati, Vox and others to give a condensed list of the most recent relevant headlines. While useful in its own right, Jyotirmaya’s Pipe is also a good starting point from which to develop a filtered feed of your own selected news sources.