pipes – Jason Griffey

Yahoo! Pipes

If you haven’t looked at Pipes yet, it’s a visual programming site that allows for logical linking of sources and then provides output of your logic. Take a feed, and find Flickr photos based on the most used terms in the feed. Search Yahoo for a phrase, combine it with geographic location, and find the nearest hits on a map. It’s basically a programming language for RSS and web searching…powerful, powerful stuff.

Anyone out in library land using Pipes for anything fun? It’s quite an interesting little tool…I’m playing with it, and have a few concepts that I’m going to try and work out. The only library-related Pipe I found looked like something Meredith was putting together (and was something I was thinking of) that just mashed up the feeds of all the library bloggers I read. But that’s a relatively low-level use of the service…anyone out there pushing the possibilities of this thing? I’m certainly going to try…but will have to play to learn first.

And still the Perils comments roll in…

Had a good conversation via email over the last few days with Walt Crawford, who discusses Perils briefly in his latest issue of Cites and Insights. While he had emailed me to warn me that it wasn’t all positive, I think that the points he makes are very valid (I’m becoming more aware of issues with Perils by the day). That said, I appreciate the complimentary nature of many of his comments.

And still, the spread and attention continues to amaze me. In the beginning of his comments, Walt says “Griffey publicized his paper widely.” I’m not sure how wide posting it to a blog and emailing it to one of the authors that I cited reasonably extensively (Cory Doctorow) is. From there to BoingBoing, and from there it snowballed enormously. I can’t say I’m not pleased, but I am still surprised.