Day: June 29, 2007

I’ve been reading a lot recently about Yahoo! Pipes so I thought I’d give it a try myself. I created a simple feed aggregator by merging the RSS feeds for my Google reader starred items, del.icio.us, and the RSS feed for this together and output as a new feed. I had to do some minor manipulation, for example to remove duplicates (which you get when you star, bookmark or link-blog the same item) and to sort the merged feeds into descending order of publication date. Then I took the output of the resulting feed and added it to my iGoogle page. The result is a nice summary of my recent activities.

This was a very quick experiment, and I’m sure there’s a lot more that you can do: for example, only the link title and URL is captured, not the text, nor any multimedia content. But it’s very easy to use and worthy of further experimentation.

In a follow-up to his blog article on Digital Media (reported in my article about serendipity), OU Educational Technologist Tony Hirst has used the web 2.0 site SplashCast to mash up a presentation with the cited videos. Here’s Tony’s blog article, and here is the presentation. The end result serves both as an interesting introduction to the educational possibilities of digital media and an interesting case study of what can be done with access to video sharing sites and the web.