A Consuming Experience

As you'd expect from the title, this video from BarCampLondon3 in November 2007 is a quick practical run through by Cristiano Betta of how to use Yahoo! Pipes to build your "lifestream" - no, that's not "lifestream" in the sense of a cult religion, before you run away! (In fact Cristiano beat me to it in finding the video I'd uploaded before I'd had a chance to blog it).

Yahoo! Pipes lets non-programmers build mashups relatively easy, by drag & drop etc, of content from different web sources, as long as the source has a feed whether Atom, RSS or other XML (see my introduction to feeds - Pipes are obviously another great way of making use of feeds).

The official description of Pipes: "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant."

In this case, Cristiano grabbed feeds from blogs where he's a contributor, then filtered out the other posts to leave only his posts, then combined his posts with his feeds from other web services like Flickr, Delicious, Twitter and Upcoming - so he could display a single combo webpage with all his sources: his "lifestream".

Cristiano's blog also has his guide in step by step text format. It does need a few extra steps but I shall leave the Javascripting to experts like Kirk! I've been meaning to have a play with Pipes since it first came out, but it's one of my get a round tuit things...

Click To Play

Labels: BarCamp, feeds, video, Yahoo Pipes

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