The new Yahoo Pipes service is something I really want to like, but am pretty frustrated with right now.

The concept of the pipes service isn’t easily explainable. The best I can do is to say it provides an intuitive drag and drop interface for mashing up content from different sites. Ebay searches, flickr photos, rss feeds, etc. In theory, anyway.

I’ve spent the last couple days trying to put together a pipe that would merge all of my online presences into one RSS feed: posts from this site, my flickr photos, updates on what games I’ve played on my 360, etc, all sorted by date with the most recent item at the top. Not the most useful feed in the world to be sure, but it would be handy to be able to give it out to friends and family.

I can get to the step where I mash all the feeds together just fine. But the sorting algorithm does absolutely nothing. The resulting feed shows all my blog posts, then all the blog comments, then all the flickr photos, then all the 360 updates. The date isn’t taken into account for any of them, there’s no actual sorting and merging of the feeds done at all. All four of these feeds have the pubdate attribute in their raw code, so there should be no reason I can’t sort by it.

I think you can see my pipe here, if anybody wants to take a crack at telling me what I’m doing wrong: http://pipes.yahoo.com/people/ZulVVVA1oXWEOpI5loGw

I think there’s a lot of potential in the Pipes concept – lowering the technical barrier to entry on mashups would be a great thing. I just wish I could figure out how it works. Maybe the promised eventual tutorials will help.

I’m also really interested to see any useful library-related projects that have come from Pipes.

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I have a an odd fascination with pointless data that will never be of real use to me in daily life. Here’s a few links in that spirit:

Enter in a tracking number from any service – UPS, USPS, FedEX, or DHL – to PackageMapping.com and this site does a whole suite of processing on the tracking information. You can view the raw timestamps just like on each carrier’s official site, as well as view a map of progress, an RSS feed or email notifications, a grand total transit time, and a calculated average speed of your delivery. My recent order from Barnes & Noble made it here in 48 hours and 45 minutes, with an average speed of 61.52mph. A lot of these features (especially the RSS feed) really should be provided by the shippers themselves. But until they do, this works nicely.

I recently received a “bag of crap” from woot.com. Periodically they sell a random pile of items for $1 under that name. My package included a Thermohawk 200 no touch thermometer. It measures the infrared radiation coming off an object, instead of the more traditional air or interior temperature. So, for example, my microwaved pizza was 118 degrees. My laptop’s screen is running at 86 degrees. By and large it seems pretty accurate compared to my more traditional thermometer, but I’m a bit concerned that my forehead measures as 91.5F… Of course, I have no practical use for the thing, but for $1? Not too shabby.

360voice.com has a fun gimmick – it monitors the progress of your Xbox Live gamer profile, and automatically updates a blog as if it was written by your console. You can see what my Xbox thinks of me here.

That’s all for now!

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By no means is this an all-inclusive list.

http://www.pat2pdf.org/ – This site lets you download a whole U.S. patent in one pdf file, as opposed to the official registry’s method of one page at a time. I made a couple of our researching faculty members really happy with this link.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/scout.php – See which of your Flickr photos have been featured on the Explore page. Four of my year in photos project made the cut! (On a related note, I’m going to revive that project for 2007)

This primer/guide has been invaluable as I start to think about getting an HDTV. So many acronyms and numbers! Unlike a lot of more technical tv choice guides, this one is anchored with a dose of reality.

Beth of LibGaming invited me to iLike, a social recommendation engine for iTunes. It takes up a bit more of my screen real estate than I’d like, but otherwise seems pretty useful so far.

I got an iPod Nano! (Just the 2gb version, that’s still far more music than I can listen to while running.) Combined with the Nike pedometer sport kit and an armband, it has completely changed the way I exercise. The online stat tracking and comparisons with friends is really addicting. Plus, I run outdoors more now that I can keep reasonably accurate track of how far I’ve gone. I may write more about this at some point.

Lastly, I recently got to try the Nintendo Wii at a store. Now I’m going to have to buy one. Even a simple driving game is addictive!

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The other day I received an invite to the beta release of eBible.com. I’m really impressed!

The site’s core functionality of full text bible searching isn’t anything new. Instead, the difference is in the details. Users can tag verses, and browse the tags others have assigned. Different translations of the text are displayed side by side, and commentaries dynamically show up next to the relevant passages.

Unfortunately, eBible does not contain the popular New International Version translation. But I have heard before that NIV is copyrighted, and rather expensive to get the relevant rights, so this is understandable.

I have one minor quibble that doesn’t really impact usability of the site: the bookmark functionality is redundant when tagging is available. I would much rather assign a tag like ‘bookmark’ to a verse than have to view my tags and bookmarks in separate sections of the site.

eBible is not yet accessible to the general public, but if you’d like one of my three invites just leave your e-mail address in a comment.

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Some friends and I have decided to take a trip to Disney World this fall. I haven’t been since I was about six years old, so I’m really excited. After picking a hotel, I was curious to see what it was like beyond the official site description.

One Flickr search later, I had 613 photos to look through.

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I’m still alive! Just very busy.

Today Google added a “Related Links” box that anybody can embed into their site. I’ve added it down near the bottom of my sidebar (for now) if you want to check it out.

Mostly I was just curious what Google would pull up as recommended from parsing my site. Right now its one news story about national library week and a couple of random library-related blogs.

I guess you can think of the service like the Adsense program, only you don’t get paid when people click the links. But on the plus side, these are ‘real’ links instead of ads. And meanwhile, our Google Overlords get to harvest even more data

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