Using Pipes: Feed Translation and Topping Technorati
If you are comfortable with web-based feed mashing/filtering applications like BlogSieve, FEEDblendr, FEEDcombine, FeedRinse, Feedshake, or FeedSifter, you can jump right into Pipes and start using it. You won’t be building mega mashups right away, but you can benefit from using it as the best RSS filter/combiner yet seen.
Feed Translation
A couple months ago, Oliver asked if any tools existed for machine translating RSS Feeds.
It occurred to me while playing around with Pipes that it would take about two minutes to produce versions of this blog’s feed that are machine translated by Babelfish.
Here are the machine translated feeds:
(I routinely use Babelfish to translate blogs written in French, German, or Dutch to English. It is far from perfect, but is usually good enough to let me get a solid idea what the blogger is writing about. If you’re a native reader of German, Dutch, or French, I’d be curious to hear if you think Babelfish works well enough FROM English.)
It’s really easy to do. Plug the source feed URL into a Fetch Module, pipe it to a Babelfish module, and pipe that to output.
Also, I can use one of the RSS-to-Web page tools to display the feed in an alternate language on a web page:
One-upping Technorati
You’ve seen these on blog sidebars, right? You click on it to see what other blogs have been indexed by Technorati has having linked to the blog. I decided to use Pipes to make something that would catch more references to this blog than Technorati can. I also used RSS Feed Converter to output it to a page of the blog itself using the blog’s CSS for formatting (so it looks like it fits in with the blog). I think it came out pretty well, but have a look and let me know what you think. You can see how it was built here (requires a Yahoo account, but that only takes a minute to sign up for).
Web-based tools for manipulation of feeds just took a big leap forward. Pipes was only just released in beta, and neither of these is an especially complex application.
Additional Info
Libraryfolk talking about Pipes.
February 13th, 2007 at 5:09 am
genial! Thanks a lot! I will give it a try…
February 13th, 2007 at 7:33 am
I made an English feed of medinfo, but unfortunately babelfish will not translate words with umlaute (vowel-mutation). The umlaute will be shown in the translation as question marks. See for example http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ulC0Lky72xGFq489zKky6g/
This bug is independent on the coding of the feed (ISO-8859 or UTF-8). In contrary, the Babelfish site will translate it pretty fine if cut&pasted there.
February 13th, 2007 at 8:31 am
Well, that’s annoying. :p
February 16th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Trackback:
[...]Library bloggers, notably Aaron and Sarah, have posted a bit about it. There’s not much by way of official help or documentation yet, but other blogs (like Mr. Speaker, Frantic Industries, and David Rothman) have posted some ideas.[...]
June 19th, 2007 at 8:30 am
[...] BabelFish wouldn’t do it. (It gave me an entertaining error message, though: “Insane value.”) I was initially encouraged when I used Google Translate, which did in fact give me a version of the blog’s XML page in English. But I couldn’t subscribe to it. Then I found David Rothman’s advice: Use Yahoo Pipes. [...]
June 27th, 2007 at 6:20 am
[...] davidrothman.net » Blog Archive » Using Pipes: Feed Translation and Topping Technorati (tags: blog internet mashup pipes translation yahoo rss web20) [...]
June 27th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
David, those are some interesting uses of Pipes. You might be interested in a post I wrote that has several ideas for other uses, ways to add value to feeds as well as find value from feeds. It’s at the end of an overview of Pipes, Popfly, and Google Mashup Editor. Hope you find it useful:
http://socialstrategist.com/2007/06/02/more-signal-less-noise-the-power-of-rss-mashups
Best,
Jay Neely, Social Strategist
http://socialstrategist.com