plumbers wanted

at first there was dial up and the bits dripped to us through our ultra thin telephone lines like water out of chennai taps. then came tcp/ip connections or as we liked to call it "the one with more pictures of [insert covergirl/actress name here] than you would ever be able to see in your lifetime". these days the net is 'free' and i have a decent number of feeds in my rss reader. more than half of those go unread. lets just say that if the information onslaught were a snowstorm, it would take a while for us to dig our cars out. realising that bloggers like me might soon start misusing more weather related analogies, yahoo decided to introduce a spanking new snowblower called pipes

the pipes are a neat tool. quite like their unix counterparts. they are meant to let you create a sort of filter to retrieve the essence of the growing information stockpile. it took me a while to figure out that it does not work with safari or opera (the faqs mention it, i didnt think to read there first).but on camino/firefox i found it rather easy to hook up my blog to one of their 'modules', produce a stream of keywords from the titles of my posts and then pass it on to flickr which promptly displayed images that were not at all related to my blog. a quick search revealed that a hundred other folks had applied pretty much the same logic and so there are a lot of flickr related pipes already. tim o'reilly has more on this in a neat write up

pipes are new. the buzz will be enough to cause several bloggers suffering writer's block to chime in with their thoughts.they are still a little tied down in terms of what they allow one to do. but i'm sure they will catch on, more features will be added and ppl will probably clone that flickr pipe and apply it to youtube and google videos eventually creating seveal more ways to search for porn. but for the rather brief time that i tinkered with it, it made me feel a little intelligent. so get off that rss reader's scroll button and make yourself a nice, warm cup of filtered information. its a blizzard out there.

here is the link again: http://pipes.yahoo.com