Yahoo Pipes!

Yahoo!'s new Pipes service - which it describes as 'an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator' that will enable people to 'create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant' - is getting a lot of coverage around the tech blogs.

From what I've read, the service will allow people who aren't programmers not only to easily create their own mash-ups, but to create super-duper mash-ups, drawing multiple sources of data from throughout the web and presenting it to you in the way that you've designed it to.

This is one of those things I don't fully understand, but I can see the glimmers of understanding ahead of me. At any rate, I've linked below to posts by a couple of people who do get this - and see its potential.

Tim O'Reilly - O'Reilly Radar
Jeremy Zawodny - Techmeme (with links to heaps more stories)
Yahoo! Pipes site - currently crashed by techy eager beavers

The long and the short of it

In a post on Monday, Tim O'Reilly wrote about the way that web publishing - and particularly the growth of blogging - is changing the way we create and deliver information.

In particular, O'Reilly notes the prevalence of short-form content, which suits the way we scan and skip through web content, and also lends itself to social production, or the collaborative creation of content.

The connection between short, modular and open - O'Reilly Radar

On Rough Type, Nicholas Carr responds to O'Reilly's piece, noting the danger posed by the short-form to the long-form (movies compared to Youtube clips):

"The new medium doesn't just promote the proliferation of small pieces; it devalues the long form. In fact, it doesn't even make room for big, extended works. It's actively biased against them, technologically and economically. More than that, though, it both reflects and reinforces our own increasing bias against anything that requires sustained attention or contemplation."

Honey, I shrunk the culture - Rough Type