Using Yahoo! Pipes to Track Breaking News Stories

Ian Cairns — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:03:01 +0000

Robin Hamman from the BBC wrote on his personal Cybersoc.com blog today about some aggregation work he's been doing with Yahoo! Pipes. We love what he's up to. (HT: I got the tweet from Rheingold's feed.)

With the rise of so many citizen journalists, Robin is trying to solve the problem of information clutter by filtering through social media sites looking for keywords that might be signals of a real breaking story. By using Pipes, he has built a single RSS feed that searches for a keyword across several social media sites where citizen reports are likely to pop up: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and on blog search engines Technorati and IceRocket.

Using good keywords that could signal a big story -- he picked Explosion, Evacuation, and Bomb to start -- gives him feeds that let him know whenever chatter about one of these terms spikes online. Using a couple other tools that Pipes offers, he's able to do a little extra filtering and make sure he's cutting out as much clutter as possible and still finding the good stuff. Here's a picture of what part of this Pipe looks like:

Posts in the category: Social Media

Using Yahoo! Pipes to Track Breaking News Stories