Yahoo! Pipes may solve a problem I have been complaining about a lot lately.
When I do Reputation Monitoring or erecting a Driftnet, I basically create several RSS feeds of searches. Let's say that I want to monitor references to my name, Dave Barnhart. I'll set up a Google Blog Search and a Google News Search on "Dave Barnhart". But because Google doesn't catch everything, I'll also use Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, BlogDigger, and other blog search tools.
While that better insures that I don't miss anything, it also means that I have to wade through a lot of duplicates. I've often said, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could run all these RSS Feeds through some sort of filter that would remove the dupes?".
Enter Yahoo! Pipes. I haven't given it a rigorous test but I've played with it a little and the interface is so intuitive that I didn't even have to read the documentation to figure out how to build a pipe to do just what I was looking for.
You simply drag tools or modules from the left sidebar, configure them, and then drag a connector between them. Cool and easy.
I'll experiment with it more over the next few days and let you know how it is working out. I bet that Pipes will become a regular part of my toolset.
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