I write an entry about Yahoo! Pipes, and I get a contextual ad for drain and sewer clearance.
Thank you Google!
Yahoo! just launched their Pipes product, and I’m pretty excited. It’s a beta (everything’s a beta nowadays) and still has some bugs, but I think it’s pretty interesting and useful. Essentially it allows you to work with information from lots of different sources (including search results, RSS feeds, Flickr, Yahoo! Local) to combine, link, reformat and manipulate them to create something that’s greater than the sum of the parts.
Here’s an example:
What does this do? First of all, it takes a user input, which it uses to filter all the output, and the default value is "Ikea".
Then it takes data from a bunch of input sources:
- A Google news results page’s RSS feed (for the search string "agency.com")
- A Yahoo search for the term "agency.com" restricted to the site adage.com
- A search at Technorati for the term "agency.com"
And it combines all of those into a single result set.
It then filters all the results from those sources, looking for the term the user input in the beginning, such as "Ikea".
The result? A listing of all Agency.com news from Google News, Adage.com and Technorati, with a user selected filter (like a client name or "Dave Eastman" for example).
This is a really simple example. It has lots of other features, like being able to pull locations out of articles and then search for the nearest plumber, or pulling author names from RSS feeds and looking up their photos on Flickr. It’s not a totally end-user product, but it is very easy to use considering its richness, and there’s lots of documentation, and lots of examples.
I’ll demo it at a London company meeting for Agency.com soon, but it’s worth a look now.
Oh, and you can run the search I created, here.
I sat down with my IT Manager to review her workload earlier today, and one of her tasks concerned the “Exchange DST” patch she has to install. I asked what this was about, and it’s crazy! Apparently, in 2005 the US legislated to change the date on which its clocks go forward this year so that we will be 4 to 7 hours ahead for 2 weeks, instead of the usual 5 to 7 hours.
I looked around and this fact hardly seems to have surfaced in the mainstream press at all. The highest profile article I found was in the Register.
I would expect there will be all sorts of (mostly minor and niggling) caused by this. Since it’s happening in 3 weeks time, are we all prepared? I can see my company will be, from an IT perspective at least, but given the story’s low profile to date, have all the angles been thought through?
And why didn’t George Bush get Bill Gates’s permission before doing this? Surely something like this would’ve required Bill to OK it?
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2281397.ece
The Independent reports that Robert Adler, the co-inventor of the wireless remote control, has died aged 93.
He sounds like he was a real creative dynamo: apart from the remote, he held more than 180 patents.
I wonder how many remotes there are in the world today. We have 5. Even our imac has a remote control now.
Congratulations to Zoomf, where my friend Mike is Biz Dev supremo, for getting funding from the Howzat investment fund.
They’ve been working on this for a long time now, and it’s starting to look really interesting. The product is coming together and I can see it’s going to be a healthy business before long.
Well done!
If this doesn’t get you walking instead of driving, and switching lights off, and turning the heating down, nothing will.
We have to do something drastic and soon, about global warming. Well done Richard Branson, for offering $25m to the scientist who figures out how to turn CO2 back into carbon and oxygen. Details here.
