Friday, March 16, 2007

Community filtered journal RSS feeds


I was trying out Yahoo pipes today to see how much we can actually program with it. It has some loop functions and regex filters but otherwise it is currently a bit limited. One thing that it is very good for is to combine and filter RSS feeds. Imagine that you want to get all the papers of a journal (or a group of journals) but only if someone else has for some reason found them interesting. This was what I tried to do with this pipe. I piped the RSS feed for MSB through a Yahoo query restricted to Connotea or Citeulike and in return I get a feed for the papers that have been tagged by other people in these sites. The problem is that this relies on the yahoo search, so it has to wait for yahoo to crawl those sites before it identifies the a new tagged paper and it is also possible that the paper title is to ambiguous and therefore incorrectly matched.

To add/change the input journals copy the pipe from here and edit the top fetch box.
(disclamer: I am currently working for MSB)