Yahoo Pipes: Analyzing Digg, Part 2: By Category and Submitter

This is part two of a short series that uses Yahoo Pipes to analyze information about Digg home page stories. Part 1 covered sorting by submitter (member name). Anything not explained here is probably explained in the last post – so please check there.

This part looks at sorting first by story category, then by category and submitter. The former shows any topical bias for the site (i.e., Digg members obviously like articles about Apple), and the latter shows any topical bias for popular members.

Of course, you could guess at some of this information, but having a social media analysis tool lets you collect data automatically over a long term. You can use similar pipes to build a profile for each social media site. Or if you don’t feel like saving the daily data, you can just subscribe to the resulting modified RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. Note that each social media site has different feed information and thus you cannot reuse the Pipes in this example as is. However, the general principles are the same.

Digg feed variables used

We’ll use two Digg feed variables in Yahoo Pipes this time:

digg:category
digg:submitter.digg.username

The regex rule used for the title is

replace (^.*$) with [${digg:category}]  [${digg:submitter.digg:username}] $1.

However, we could also use:

replace ^ with [${digg:category}] [${digg:submitter.digg:username}] .

They both mean the same thing: insert the Digg category and username at the beginning of the story title. (Note that there’s a space at the end of the second version’s replacement pattern string.)

Process

The process for building these Pipes is fairly simple.

Pipe 2a: by category only

1. Grab the Digg home page feed.
2. Insert the story category, in square brackets, at the beginning of each title.
3. Replace each story’s item.description field with nothing.
4. Sort the list of home page stories by modified title.

Pipe 2b: by category and submitter

1. Grab the Digg home page feed.
2. Insert both the story category and submitter, each in square brackets and in that order.
3. Replace each story’s item.description field with nothing.
4. Sort the list of home page stories by modified title.

Yahoo Pipes modules used

These are the modules used in these Pipes:

1. Fetch Feed
2. Regex
3. Sort
4. Pipe Output

Links

Here are the links to the two Yahoo Pipes used in this example. If you have a Yahoo Mail account, you can clone and tweak these pipes:

1. Digg homepage by category.
2. Digg homepage by category and submitter.

Summary

Part 3 of this series will use Yahoo Pipes to filter out home page story categories you’re not interested in, as well ignore stories with less than X votes, where you can specify X.