Yahoo Pipes, to date, seems one of those unsung tools that could really be useful, especially to SEOs. However, when I scour the sixty plus SEO blogs whose feeds I subscribe to, I don’t see Yahoo Pipes mentioned much. (I just checked.) But it can be of use:
- Aggregate multiple related web feeds.
- Filter for desired topics.
- Sort multiple feeds by date, to aid in detecting temporal trends (topics).
- Sort by keywords in feed item titles.
- Sort by member who submitted the story, in the case of social bookmarking sites.
I’ve been posting a number of simple Yahoo Pipes video how-to examples over at Tubetorial, but here’s a fresh one: social bookmark search. (Splashcast video at bottom.) I’ve taken the several feeds and merged them:
- del.icio.us.
- digg.
- reddit.
- slashdot.
Okay, Slashdot isn’t really a social bookmarking site per se, but it’s kind of the predecessor – no voting. And Digg and Reddit are more social news than social bookmarks. But it’s simply an example. You can change the feed list to your liking. [Yahoo Pipes could really do with an OPML import feature.]
After merging the feeds, an user-supplied search term is applied as a topical filter on the feed item titles or descriptions. The result is a new RSS feed that you can subscribe to and check on social news/ bookmarking trends more easily. A simple video how-to on building the Social Bookmarking Search pipe (which you can clone and tweak) is below.
Notes
A couple of things to take note of:
- Digg had once blocked Yahoo Pipes, but I haven’t had any problem lately. In fact, I have another Pipe that organizes a day’s home page stories sorted by Digg submitter. (I’ll find it and post it here.)
- There may be some problems with the audio of the SplashCast. If so, try again later. However, you may not need my narration to follow along.)
