Yahoo! have launched a new service called Pipes.
It allows you take user input, grab web feeds, do clever stuff to the result and output it either as RSS or JSON - all with a nice graphical interface. I had a quick play with it and decided there was loads of potential for this. Although I couldn’t really think of any specific examples, but I’m sure people will start coming up with cool stuff eventually.
One of the main advantages of blogs as a publishing medium is also a big disadvantage at times - the time sensitive nature. The fact that the information is about as up to the minute as you can get (in general) means blogs are a better source of news (or more importantly opinions about news) than search engine results for instance. But this means that some of your content can be come rather pointless after a short time.
Some articles are essentially timeless however. If you’re lucky and lots of people link to them you should be able to get some steady search engine traffic but people looking for something that specific aren’t likely to hang around after reading them. So FeedCycle.com have come up with a reasonably clever way of letting you push your old content but still keeping a blogesque feel to it.
The idea is to create a custom feed of a subsection of your content. The example they push a lot is a podcast “series” about the same topic, but it can be any thematically linked (and generally ordered) series of posts from your blog. When someone subscribes they get the first post in the series. The next day, they get the next post and so on until the end of the series. There is a plug-in somewhere for Wordpress that lets you mark posts as part of a series and to create navigation links to quickly get between them. Used in conjunction with this would let your users read through the whole series or just sit back and have it delivered.
Now if only I ever posted such a series…