I recently found myself in want of a service that allowed me to aggregate my Google Calendars. In searching around I stumbled across Pipes. Pipes is a service that allows you to aggregate several feeds soruces into a single feed. The sources and output can be RSS, icalendar and other formats. What sets Pipes apart is that you can fiter, sort and transform the items in the feeds before outputing the aggregate so you can create some very powerful custom feeds. The idea behind Pipes is similar to *nix command line tools where you can pipe the output of one tool to the input of another to create some very powerful chains of commands. Pipes a fairly intuitive user interface for wiring the different peices together to create your aggragate feed, you just drag the output of one peice to the input of another.
Chris was able to use Pipes to create a feed that searches blogs and see if NAR is mentioned, to help us find out who is talking about us.
Pipes is still in beta, I for one was unable to aggregate different Google calendar feeds in a way that could be imported into iCal. Also, documentation of how to use some of the pieces is pretty sparse. But Pipes is a tool that has a lot of possiblities, and I look forward to seeing how it develops.
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