April 4, 2011

Something in the pipeline, again.

A colleague is currently testing internet based data- and information collection and distribution channels regarding media development. In order to add more value for future users of his frontend, he wanted to offer some sort of news-ticker. Right away, we thought of using Yahoo Pipes. I had not used the service for quite some time and was wondering, if it withstood the currently hard times for Yahoo-services (e.g. "delicious"). It turned out to be up, running and even more advanced. Yet I tend to use the same set of features as always in order to produce automated news mashups.

I have created three new Pipes:
1. a feed mashup, collecting articles from a list of relevant media development feeds (i.e. UNESCO IPDC, ONI, IWMF, etc.)



2. a site-search mashup, searching relevant media development actors' (i.e. UNESCO, DVID, Worldbank, etc.) websites for search term "media development"



3. a meta mashup, combining Pipes 1 and 2 with other services (i.e. Google News, -Base, -Blogsearch, -Alert, Twitter search, etc.)

Compared with my old Pipes, No 1 and 2 are now far more flexible. I now make use of Google-Spreadsheets containing a list of either rss-feeds or actors' websites, making it possible to add an infinite number of new relevant sources for the mashups. When shared, G-Documents passes the spreadsheet's content as string of comma seperated values (csv), which can then be interpreted by the Pipes, using the 'Loop' and 'Fetch Feed' modules.

I recommend checking public Pipes for similar attempts first: I came up quite quickly with the idea of using spreadsheets, but encountered errors trying to implement it (maybe due to the recently introduced Pipes-Engine 2.0). Finally I made some adjustments to a public 1.0-Pipe by Adrian Short and got it working.

You are welcome to check both Pipes and Spreadsheets. You may also want to contribute to the list of sources - just let me know and I will grant permission to edit the Google-Document.

Spreadsheets:
rss-sources
actors' websites

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