Yahoo! Pipes, a first attempt

As it is with most things and me, I’ve been simultaneously fascinated by and frightened of Yahoo! Pipes since I first read about it a year or so ago. I wasn’t working directly within the tech industry, so it was easy to hide from it and wallow in my forced ignorance — until a few months ago.

First, my tech-savvy former editor and mentor started using it to filter and plot stories we’d covered. But it wasn’t adopted by our department, so I got to keep ignoring it.

Then I heard Salim Ismail (hey, nice template!) of Yahoo! Brickhouse speak at WebContent 2007. I didn’t learn a whole lot, largely because he managed to leave his Powerpoint presentation with someone who had just headed to France and made up for it by quickly throwing together the same presentation to cover what were supposed to be two separate talks, including a keynote. But he did cover Pipes, and as he went on it became clear that this thing isn’t going away, and that I’d be seriously embarrassed later on if I didn’t at least attempt to mess around with it.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing this morning…

The idea is that anything that I tag with “restaurants_visited” on my del.icio.us account will automatically appear here, as long as I have the address in the Notes section. A few things aren’t plotting, though. Trying to figure out what the deal is there.

As a first-timer, this took a couple of hours, mostly because I didn’t have any of these bookmarked previously. Not too bad, but I still think the interface is unnecessarily intimidating and the terminology obscure. Definitely something they’re going to have to work on if they want non-Power Users to mess around with it — which is the only way it’s going to be truly useful and profitable.

Here are some other things I could probably do:

-Post separate entries about each restaurant on my blog and associate them with the plot points so the text displays in the map descriptions

-Take pics of the restaurants, upload to Flickr and tag so they would display with map descriptions

-Mark each as “good” or “bad,” then export to KML and set up to display with green and red placemarks, respectively, on GoogleEarth