Jon Jolly

This Yahoo! service has been around for a little while now, but I’ve only just started to get to grips with it. It’s basically a powerful tool for getting the information you want brought to you from around the web. If you get bored with technical stuff, read no further…

For the rest of you, Pipes is a great way to mashup RSS feeds (you know, the bit that broadcasts your content across the web everytime you update your site). From Yahoo!:

Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources. Simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

• combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate to create your ultimate custom feed.
• geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
• remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
• build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
• power badges on your web site.
• extend your web site by accessing the JSON or RSS output from Pipes.

So far I’ve only managed the simplest use of Pipes which is combining, sorting and filtering feeds to create my own custom RSS. I generally read most blogs or news items in Google Reader. Every time I find a blog that I want to read regularly, I subscribe to it and tag it with a category (E.g. ‘Tech’). All the blogs that I read to do with Christian youth work ministry, I tag ‘YM-blogs’ and then can always find updates under that heading. Google Reader has a great feature that allows you to create an RSS feed of any tags you’ve created. Here is the feed for ‘YM-blogs’.
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/15039631766755983999/label/ym-blogs. It’s basically all the youth work blogs that I read pulled together into one feed. You could subscribe to this if you wanted.

With Pipes, rather than copying all the feeds of those blogs one by one, I created a pipe that takes my ‘YM-blogs’ RSS feed from Google Reader and then searches it for the word ’school’ or ’schools’. It then arranges posts by date and throws them out the other end in a new RSS feed. Here is the result: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=KqQhe2gh3BG6htu8nkartA&_render=rss

All this is quite clever, but it really comes into it’s own when you can search for houses available to rent in a certain area and have the results overlayed on a map! However, what I really love about Pipes is the visual interface. You drag and drop different modules and then connect them together with ‘cables’. It’s kind of like creating a marble run. You can see my simple example of how I put this together with different modules here (you’ll need to sign in to Yahoo!).

The whole thing is a bit geeky (I love it!), but there is potential to find and sort hundreds of pages of information relevant to youth work and ministry. Once I’ve created a useful pipe, I’ll let you know!

For those of us who can’t live without a daily dose of caffeine or music, there may be some good news coming up. The current speculation is that you could soon walk into Starbucks, buy a caramel macchiato and download the latest U2 release onto your iPod. Full rumor-mongering here.

Update: On a similar note, I’ve just read an interesting article about the “Death of DRM” (Digital Rights Management) and how record labels are looking to standard MP3 files as the future of downloading music. For more on DRM, try defectivebydesign.org

iTunes 7.0.0

Originally uploaded by Tom M Ward.

I love this! It seems there are a few glitches with the new version of iTunes, but what a great effect!

There’s quite a few services out there that rely on ‘tagging’ bits of information for searching, indexing and organising (del.icio.us, technorati and flickr to name a few). But recently I’ve noticed a few websites that are making use of tagging to tie information to specific geographical locations. Flickr is the latest one to catch my eye as I can now drag and drop my photos onto a map (similar to google maps) to show where they were taken!
Now imagine the power of searching for a particular thing in a particular location and seeing the results! A lot of fun could be had with this (and of course, a lot of mischief), and there are even more powerful photo-tagging tools out there too!

Personally, I haven’t (yet) got the time to go through hundreds of photos and geotag them all, but it could become a very useful idea for future images I upload.

I found a link today for eBible, a free website with “live” searching of the Bible, commentaries and references. You can save and highlight passages, look up meanings and facts, then share tags and links with friends. Kind of like MySpace or del.icio.us for the bible! I’m not yet sure just how useful the service is so check out the link to take a tour and sign up if you’re interested. It could become a great resource for youth ministry! Let me know how you get on…

UPDATE: I just found this post on eBible and other thriving online Christian resources
read more | digg story

Various news sites are awash with the high profile targetting of Russian download site allofMP3.com. Possibly the best explanation is here at The Register.

Tim Jupp had previously warned me about the ‘grey area’ this was causing in the music industry so it was only a matter of time really. Price aside, there’s still a need for a DRM-free, multiple-format download site. Let me know if you find a legal one…

I’ve recently been buying a lot of albums off the iTunes Music Store, partly because it’s relatively cheap, but mainly because it’s instantaneous. Now don’t get me wrong, I will always prefer having a physical copy of a CD, but it has become so convenient to get the latest music straight onto my ipod and out wherever I take it!

Today I found an even more compelling reason to buy digital… www.allofmp3.com

This fully-legal Russian music download service is amazing for the sheer volume of it’s globe-spanning library and the way that you can choose to download any song in MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV files at a variety of unprotected bit rates. But the most amazing feature is the price.

Aimed at the fledgling download market in Russia, all prices are in US Dollars and very, very cheap. Today I bought the excellent lo-fi offering of Veneer by Jose Gonzalez for $0.87. That’s all 11 tracks in MP3 format at a bit rate of 192, for a grand total of 49p! Yes, 49p.

allofmp3.com does have it’s failings. You have to transfer credit to your account, and you have to individually download each track by right clicking and saving to your hard drive - tedious if you’re buying a long album. But at these sorts of prices and with the choice of unprotected file formats, it’s surely worth it. For a review of the website, Click Here.

Is this the new true video ipod? I certainly hope so!

I’ve been using Google’s Gmail service for some time now because it offers some excellent features that competitors don’t. POP access for collecting your mail through another email client (Outlook etc), 2.5GB of free storage, powerful search, filtering, and sending mail from multiple addresses.
Then I recently started using ‘Google Personalised Home‘ as my homepage because you can customise it to display your Gmail inbox, your bookmarks, and as many rss feeds as you like. I’ve got feeds from BBC News, Slashdot and Empire as well as the latest weather, Movie listings, music reviews and friends Blogs on my homepage everytime I start my browser. Plus I can log-in anywhere in the world!

Well now the Google rumours appear to be true, with the leaked internal report of Gdrive. Currently in development, Gdrive promises to be an unlimited amount of online storage to keep all your files, music, media within easy reach anywhere you go. A definite advantage for certain things, yet be sure to keep personal/sensitive documents away from such online storage ideas as many have been quick to point out that if Google can’t even keep their own files secure, why should we trust them with ours?

Oh, for all you hotmail users, Microsoft have launched various aspects of Windows Live where you get massively increased storage, a personalised homepage, an improved search facility, plus local maps and directions, among others. Sound familiar?

Sony Ericsson has announced it’s new line up of mobile handsets will feature integrated Google services such as support for Blogger. Great news for people who use Blogger and love the SE interface, they can now blog from anywhere (although they’d by stuck if their beautiful mobile were accidently run-over)! The new handsets include the ‘Cyber-Shot’ branded K800i with a 3.2 Megapixel Camera.