Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

Information overload. Yeah, yeah. But infogreed at the same time, right? The Globe didn’t arrive outside my hotel room this morning and that stressed me; the wireless connection I was using in the room decided to lock me out, adding another stress. But when I managed to get online I had three hundred and change new posts in my RSS reader and an annoying number of emails…

What is a datafella to do? Well, filter is one pretty good answer. Filter and aggregate. This is what Steve “StemLegal” Matthews always advises. But I never seem to have/take the time to set up the proper traps, switches and sinks to gather all but only what I need.

But I’m taking a look at what others have done over at Yahoo! Pipes, that nifty internet plumbing tool we’ve talked about more than once here on Slaw. And so I don’t have to go tediously through it all, ReadWriteWeb has come up with a couple dozen of the better efforts there in The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List.

So, for example, there’s

• Content Keyword RSS which lets you put in your important terms, then searches Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News and kicks out an RSS feed of integrated results. Even I could copy this thing and modify the sites it searches to make it do my precise bidding.
• Twitter Link Monitor that filters your Twitter feed to extract all those posts containing links, so you can separate the neat from the chat.
• Amazon, Craigslist and eBay price watcher that does just what it says, returning those items that fit within your search terms and price mins and maxes.
• New Movie Trailers which gives you the latest iTunes movie trailers mashed with their videos on YouTube.

Go have a look. Play around. And if you come up with a mod of your own let us know and we’ll publicize it on Slaw.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).