I've been kicking around an idea for a while to post on the topic of technology, specifically how it can be applied to politics in a practical and innovative fashion. I hope to make this an ongoing series, but we'll see how that goes.
For the inaugural topic I wanted to discuss a new service launched by Yahoo called Pipes. It sounds geeky, but the point of it is that it really isn't, it is a powerful tool for everyone.
Tim O'Reilly has a good post about this over at his blog.
He writes:
Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.
~snip~
Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the "ue" this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it's a good start on the Unix shell for mashups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be "text entities." You can solicit user input and build URL lines to submit to sites. The drag and drop editor lets you view and construct your pipeline, inspecting the data at each step in the process. And of course, you can view and copy any existing pipes, just like you could with shell scripts and later, web pages.
~snip~
Pipes can simply be used as a kind of "power browser." (something Dale Dougherty has been looking for even longer than I've been looking for pipes and filters for the web). For example, you can build a custom mashup to search for traffic along your own routes every morning, or a news aggregator that searches multiple sites for subjects you care about. All you have to do is start with one of the existing modules. (And presumably, once pipes is opened to the public tonight, there will be many more, as anyone can publish their own modules.)
There's a lot more there, I just excerpted a few things. O'Reilly also writes at a level where he presumes you understand technology for the most part so it is easy to get lost there.
But here's where I think this has value for bloggers, campaigns, etc. These worlds involve information, and lots of it. The people who are most successful are those that can gather the most relevant information and put it to use. In pratice this involves bringing in a lot of information that isn't particularly useful as well in the hopes that you'll net something useful.
So here's a few scenarios of how something like this might be put in place.
Scenario 1
Let's say you are a blogger and you are focused on a specific issue, net neutrality. If you are doing your job right you are probably already scouring the web for juicy bits to write about. You may even be using RSS feeds already to get this information. You could put this to use by using Pipes to create a single information source that contains all of the information you want to look at on that topic. This can be taken from RSS feeds offered by other sites, you can run very specific searches with Google and then get an RSS feed for that search result set, you can pull in search results from blog aggregators like technorati, and you can even pull in RSS feeds from government sites that offer them. Now you have this big pile of information, you can use pipes to eliminate duplicates and further refine the information.
You are still going to end up with a lot of information to go through but now you do it in one place and some of the work has been done for you.
Most people don't write on just a single subject, so imagine doing this for all the subjects you write about. Wouldn;t that make your life easier by making you more efficient?
Scenario 2
Ok now we're talking about a campaign. Increasingly campaigns have people dedicated to basically reading everything there is to read on the race and filtering that down. I'm not part of that world so I can't say for sure but it seems to me it is just the bigger campaings that can afford to do that because it is resource intesive.
I think this changes the game. You still need people to decide what is relevant, but as described in scenario 1 now gathering your information is even easier and perhaps automated (I think some campaigns actually physically read web pages every day on their candidate)
Scenario 3
Finally, let's think about doing this in the other direction. Let's say you are some kind of organization. Right now many organizations provide some kind of newsletter or RSS feed for updates they put out. But what if now you could not only get updates from that organization but you could also read anything said about them in the media, or anything said about them on a blog. That'd be pretty cool right? This tool gives an organization the power to do that for their supporters.
Pipes will likely change and evolve quite a bit over this year, but it is definitely worth thinking about how you can use it to your benefit if you are a blogger, politician, or run an organization.