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!