Wow..... imagine a feeds designer that allows you to take input from multiple locations, run it through a designer, and output a new feed. 

Consider for example the MSDN RSS Feed.  If you subscribe to this feed and read the posts then, 1)  You have too much time on your hands, and 2) You will find that this single feed uses many languages.

What is to be done.  In the past if I did happen to read the feed I would just have to skip posts that were in a language I didn't understand or use some type of filter in my blog reader so that I never even saw them.  It so happens that the current blog reader I use (http://reader.google.com) doesn't support any filter mechanism.  Instead, I decided to create a new feed using Yahoo Pipes.  What's more, I can publish this feed so that others can take advantage of it.  There is not better way to understand Yahoo Pipes besides trying it I expect, but Tim O'Reilly, a pretty good description.  Essentially, you can take a data source (RSS for example), and run it through a series of operators, perhaps combine it with other feeds, and create a new feed.  The Yahoo Pipes name comes from the command line pipe operator that allows one to pass output from one command to the next.  It is really amazing what they were able to accomplish in the designer considering I didn't encounter any security dialogs when running it.

My first test was to create an MSDN Blog feed that was entirely English.  Currently the feed simply filters out languages other than English.  However, it seems relatively simply to add the capacity to automatically translate those in other languages.   Yahoo Pipes includes a BabelFish operator that can translate a feed from one language to another.  I confess I haven't done this yet (I haven't identified the languages for some posts).

Omar Shahine points out another opportunity for customization of feeds.  In his post he praises how certain tags can be removed from LifeHacker.  Yahoo Pipes could of course do the same thing for any feed and it provides a much higher customization capability - one not necessarily based on tags for example.  With Yahoo Pipes Omar could have shared his feed of LifeHacker so others who had similar filters could use it directly or even customize it further (either via coping it or having it as the feed to a new pipe).

Anyway, this is a pretty cool app that demonstrates SOA, mashing, and the like, in a whole new way.  Wowzers!!

For those interested in the resulting MSDN Blogs in English feed, the RSS URL is: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/DtICXmC42xGAi_AREpPZnA/run?_render=rss

Give it a try... feedback is welcome.  I will continue to remove or translate posts as I encounter them coming through.

[UPDATE] 2/13/2006

It really is amazing what they have done in Java Script but the site still has some growing up to do.  Each time I re-load my filter I have to reset the fields because they are not loading correctly.  I have crossed out the URL so as to not have any (further) expectations that this will work.

Saturday, February 10, 2007 2:14:57 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  Computer Related | .Net | Blogging | Miscellaneous