pipes1

This is an FYI post. I thought about sharing my way of using RSS for various purposes that regard to staying informed about market trends or specific companies. I have used this simple method while interning at a cash-strapped company. Early-stage startups or just people with ideas may find this useful.

The gist of this is filtering your RSS feeds. I am assuming you are a user of RSS. If not, and you are reading this blog, then it would probably be a good idea for you to get started. Get the free FeedDemon and start saving time.

Let’s say you have an idea for a product, and you want to see what’s going on with other companies. So you subscribe to an RSS feed of an industry publication. But you want to know only about some specific companies, without having to go through every feed every day.  That’s where you can use Yahoo Pipes. They have a great graphic interface which kind of reminds me of wiring that you would do between modules in a music application. Your pipe should be extremely simple. You fetch a feed or as many feeds as you like with the appropriate module and hook it to a filter containing conditions on what words you want to see in the title, description or author of the feed. The last step is to hook the filter to the feed output. Then all you have to do is run it, and add the feed to your RSS reader. This is virtually creating a feed off of a search engine of a specific site, since sites don’t offer that kind of customization to their RSS feeds. This can be used for many purposes.

Yahoo pipes offers much more functionality, with many different modules and operators that you can run on RSS feeds. For instance there is a pipe marking a ship’s route on a map using the ship’s coordinate feeds and Google maps, and a bunch of neat stuff. There’s a host of user-created examples, with the source piping included to help you understand what’s going on, as well as simple tutorials.

I realize that this is a geeky post, but I wanted to expose something that I found useful. Let me know if you find this useful as well.

If you liked this post, please share it!
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis

Tagged with: • • • • •

Filed under: Entrepreneurship • Marketing • Technology

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!