The Evolving Newsroom

Paul Bradshaw of onlinejournalism.com has done a nice job explaining how to use Yahoo Pipes, which is a tool that lets you aggregate and bundle RSS feeds in ways that suit your needs. He’s previously posted about how to use it for journalism:

Pipes is essentially a mashup tool, particularly useful for doing things with RSS feeds. And at its basic levels it doesn’t require any knowledge of programming language.

Here’s some examples of things I’ve done with it:

• Aggregated a number of RSS feeds into one
• Translated RSS feeds from other languages into English
• Filtered an RSS feed so that only entries with links come through (a custom search)

  They were pretty easy, to be honest. More impressive are:

• Robin Hamman’s “UGC Finder” that aggregates and filters “the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites“
• Joanna Geary’s Pipe of West Midlands news from The Birmingham Post
• The Open University Pipe that converts Twitter tweets into audio.
• Various pipes that use mapping

He covers a lot of ground in the how-to post but here’s the opening segment.

Signing up

First you’ll need to go to pipes.yahoo.com and register with the page. If you already have a Yahoo! or Flickr account you may be able to use that.

Aggregating feeds into one

1. Log on to Yahoo! Pipes and click on Create Pipe. You should be presented with a ‘graph’-style page.
2. On the left column are a number of buttons – called modules. These are arranged within different categories, the first category being Sources. In the Sources category should be a module called Fetch Feed. Click and drag this onto the graphed area.
3. You will need to copy the URL of the RSS feed you want to fetch and paste it into the Fetch Feed module input box.
4. To add extra feeds click on the plus (+) icon next to URL and further input boxes will appear. Paste the extra feeds into each new box.
5. Finally, you need to connect the Fetch Feed module to the Pipe Output. To do this click on the circle at the bottom of the Fetch Feed module and drag it to the circle at the top of Pipe Output. You should now see a pipe appear connecting the two.
6. Click on Pipe Output to see the results at the bottom of the screen.
7. That’s it. Click Save (top right), give the pipe a name, then click Run Pipe… at the top of the screen. Note: the results may be displayed as images – click List to see the text version.
8. Along the top of the results you will see various options. Click on the RSS symbol to get the option to have the output of this pipe as a standalone RSS feed. You can also click Get as a Badge to get some HTML to put on your blog and display results more attractively.

Note: with more than one feed Pipes will ‘cluster’ them together by feed rather than by date. To order the results by date, use the Sort module under the Operators category, connect it to Fetch Feed, and sort by item.pubDate in descending order.

If you want to aggregate feeds after filtering, etc. you can use the Union module under Operators category.

Read the rest here.