A few days ago, I reflected on the value of automatic link posting. Yesterday night, I read two very interesting articles about managing RSS feeds. On Mashable, Stan Schroeder rolled out a nice little list of tools to manage feeds. Among them Yahoo! Pipes, xFruits, and ReadBurner. I’m already hooked on ReadBurner, xFruits has an interesting design, but Yahoo! Pipes was the word I needed to hear.
Conveniently, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an excellent post the same night on how to capture and manage Google’s Web search feeds using Yahoo! Pipes. Awesome! That’s super close to what I was trying to do. The amazing strength of Yahoo! Pipes is its user-friendly interface. It looks really easy to use. Truth is, you can’t just mess around with your feeds. You don’t have to code your way around, but you have to understand the underlying programming logic and lingo.
Nevertheless, without being an expert, you can still play around with the basic functions Yahoo! Pipes offers. I basically tap into user-generated resources, syndicate the content around specific areas of interest, sort out the trash, and create a unique feed for each specific areas of interest. Those unique feeds have value because they could potentially satisfy a query, and replace a long browsing process.