Syndication 2.0: Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes makes it possible to apply a host of filtering and sorting functions to a variety of information souces. If for example, you want to receive news about Science from multiple RSS feeds, you can create a simple “pipe” to aggregate your news items into one individual feed. If you only want news tagged with “Europe” or “media” or a combination of both, you can determine this as part of the feed as well. In fact, the pipes can become almost as compley and specific as you like, ensuring you only get content you really want. Aggregating feeds into pipes is an awesome next step in the world of syndicated, dynamic content. Check out the Website under http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/.

Edufire: Online Language Tuition

Today I gave my first Edufire session. Incredible service and set up for tutors and students of languages alike.  The Website itself is very intuitive and sports pretty much every major community tool you may want to use. Within minutes my profile was up and running, and a day or two later (today actually!) I’d completed my first session. The online video conferencing tool is a lot easier to use than most tools I’ve encountered in the enterprise, and the Web 2.0 functionality is reminiscent of similar communities like Facebook. Check it out under: http://edufire.com/.

Common Craft: Video Podcasting

The Common Craft is quite legendary as far as simplifying technology goes. Back to the roots…well…pulp…paper…errr…anyway, well worth a look!

Free Online Family Tree

Those interested in putting together a family tree in a collaborative Web 2.0 way, can do so cheaply and effectively at http://www.itsourtree.com. The resulting trees are exportable to major genealogy-software formats so even if the Website were doomed to failure, your work can be stored offline and imported into a new application. I’ve been playing around with it for a few months now and I’ve got around 130 odd people in there…quite odd actually…