Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley

I’m just poking around the new Yahoo! Pipes service (think UNIX pipes and “small pieces loosely joined”), which is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator: a.k.a., a tool for creating data mashups. I first saw it mentioned on Global Nerdy, which links through to a number of other interesting posts about it on other blogs. TechCrunch describes it as a “visual procedural programming language”, and it goes a long way towards providing mashup capabilities to regular everyday users, not just programmers, using RSS feeds as inputs and outputs. I’ve been talking about how the idea of publishing process instance (execution) data via an RSS feed would allow for really each consumption/mashing up of the data to increase process visibility, and this appears to be the type of environment that would allow a semi-technical business user to create their own dashboard of mashed-up data.