Maybe Senator Stevens Was Right

Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska will always be remembered for his explanaion of the internet as being “a series of tubes“. He was widely ridiculed at the time, but now it appears that there may have been some truth to his statement.

The “tubes” I am talking about is “Yahoo Pipes“. This is an interesting new web aggregator that will allow you to control the RSS feeds and other info that is automatically delivered to your computer. It works much differently than other aggregators, and as the amount of information being offered on an number of subjects continues to increase, you really need a powerful tool to weed out the material that is of no interest to you.

Say you want to set up a news feed to keep track of when your favorite bands would be in the area. You could subscribe to a news feed about popular bands you were interested in, but you would have to wade through a lot of news that was not relevant to your town. You could monitor the web sites for venues where these sorts of bands play, but you would have to wade through info on other sorts of entertainment.

Yahoo Pipes would allow you to combine the feed about bands, the web sites for venues, a local mapping application and a calendar program. Only when the criteria that you set regarding the band, the venues, the geographic area and the dates you are interested in. You would not be bothered with a lot of info that wasn’t directly related to your specific interest.

It is good to see Yahoo come to the marketplace with something new, as they have been pretty far behind in the game of “catch up” when it comes to web innovation.

Yahoo Pipes is not the simplest service in the world to set up, but its power and uniqueness make it worth the trouble. Take a look!

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