Hackday London & Yahoo! Pipes

networking, social software, hackdaylondon, coding, Yahoo!

So I’m attending the London Yahoo! Open Hackday, which will take place at Ally Pally next weekend. (Squeee! They accepted me!). I’m much looking forward to it, unwashed geeks and all. The idea is to hack up something within a day, preferably using the various Yahoo!/Flickr/BBC APIs. I’m not much fazed — I’m not going there to win prizes. There will be interesting speakers and a lot to learn, and if any of the vague projects about picture dictionaries and eggcorns that are floating around in my head will take shape, all the better.

What I did do in preparation is to take a look at Yahoo! Pipes, Y!’s new graphical mashup editor. I didn’t really get it when I first looked, a few months ago. But now — wow. There’s a lot of good tutorial material, and creating your own simple mashup is a matter of minutes. I created a simple combined feed out of this blog, the English version of Diacritiques, and all entries posted by myself to the Eggcorn Database. The result is my very own first pipe, and I think after tweaking the display a little, I’ll give out the RSS feed for that one as the default feed to my stuff.

But beyond its immediate usefulness, these pipes would also be the ideal teaching tool to get internet-savvy teens (and even pre-teens) into hacking their own! Or that’s what the ex-teacher inside me thinks anyway.

chris @ June 10, 2007