Yes, it’s very cool! RSS fans, prepare to be blown away. Via this Slashdot article and CaptSolo’s post on sioc-dev:
“Yahoo has introduced a new product called Pipes. It seems to be a GUI-based interface for building applications that aggregate RSS feeds and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. Sounds very cool. TechCrunch has a decent write-up, and Tim O’Reilly is all over it. The site was down for a few hours and is just back up. Has anybody tried this?”
and from the Pipes page:
Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.
So I created a basic pipe to take three feeds from Planet Journals, IrishBlogs.ie and awards.ie about the forthcoming Irish Blog Awards using the “Fetch” module. I then used their “For Each: Annotate” module to add a sioc:topic annotation, using the first matching result from a Yahoo! search for the phrase “Irish Blog Awards”. The graphical interface is very easy to use, and a screenshot of the pipe construction is shown on the left. You can see the pipe output on the right below; unfortunately the RSS 2.0 dump loses the sioc:topic annotation I added, but the JSON dump still retains it so with a bit of manipulation this could provide the appropriate RDF.
Cloud 