Patrice-Guy Martin, editor of our French-language magazine Direction Informatique, alerted the rest of us to the beta mash-up engine Yahoo Pipes. Pipes is essential a design-your-own-newsfeed service, which allows you to pluck RSS, databases, search engines and the like, combine them, sort them, filter them, and customize a feed to your browser, which you can publish for others to use.
It. Is. Painfully. Easy. Once I'd convinced myself it really was that simple, I set up a pipe to scan four categories of Canada Newswire in about 90 seconds. I set up a job-scanning pipe feed for a friend in about 30 seconds.
Curious ... Anybody out there mashed up a feed on Pipes? I'd like to see what you're doing with it and examine the potential that I've only scratched the surface of.
Meanwhile, for entertainment value, here's a video from DraftFCB showing how your average Second Life avatar would behave in the real world. Thanks to Paul Ferriss from Marketing Magazine for the link.