When watching a recent webcast on social media measurement, I got re-introduced to a nifty tool called Yahoo Pipes.   When the tool first came out, I thought it was semi-interesting, but didn’t know what the real-world use of it was.  Well, now I’m starting to see one.

Pipes is a tool that lets you take any number of different inputs (HTML, XML, RSS, CSV, etc) and then perform a set of dynamic transformations on the data, and then have it spit out whatever data you want in whatever format you want, on the fly.

If you’re trying to perform a task like measure social media response to a campaign you’re doing, you’ll sometimes want to be grabbing hold of a number of RSS feeds, and create a custom RSS feed that you can track on Google Reader or some other RSS reader that just shows you mentions of your recent campaign or keywords.

As an example of how this works, I took an example of something simple that I wanted an RSS feed for:  I’m listening to lectures by L. Ron Hubbard, and wanted to create a little RSS widget to show the most recent tracks on last.fm that I’ve marked as “loved tracks”, so that I can keep track of them.   But I only want the tracks by L. Ron Hubbard to appear in the RSS feed.  There is no such RSS feed on the site, so I used Yahoo Pipes to create one:

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The UI to create such a feed really couldn’t be any easier to use.  You just specify an RSS source, then add a filter on the RSS source to filter by one specific RSS element, and create an RSS pipe output that contains that data.

I can then just link to an real-time RSS feed of such, and throw that onto my blog.

It’s a simple, simple example, but if, for example, you were trying to find a way around paying for a big-time social media measurement solution like Radian6 or WebTrends, you can do a little work in Pipes and build yourself a pretty neat dashboard of the data you want.