The Internet is transforming itself from a collection of web pages into a huge distributed database. There's a wealth of data out there-not just RSS and Atom feeds, but XML data on where to find a new apartment, how much to pay for a new car, how to see if there's a storm approaching. If the Internet is your new database, you need a tool to mine that data-to merge and sort and search and filter that data. That tool is Yahoo! Pipes. Widely touted as an RSS feed aggregator, Yahoo! Pipes is more than that. With Yahoo! Pipes you can manipulate virtually any web-accessible XML data source,...

The little orange feed icons are everywhere on the web. From search engines to shopping sites to blogs, Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) has become one of the hottest web technologies going. RSS 2.0 is a powerful - yet surprisingly easy - way to distributing timely content to a web-based audience. This Short Cut will give you the hands-on knowledge you need to build an RSS 2.0 feed. Along the way you'll learn not only the mechanics of building a feed, but industry-accepted best practices for creating feeds that perform well in various situations. Are you ready? Roll up your sleeves, crack...

Perhaps the most explosive technological trend over the past two years has been blogging. As a matter of fact, it's been reported that the number of blogs during that time has grown from 100,000 to 4.8 million-with no end to this growth in sight. What's the technology that makes blogging tick? The answer is RSS--a format that allows bloggers to offer XML-based feeds of their content. It's also the same technology that's incorporated into the websites of media outlets so they can offer material (headlines, links, articles, etc.) syndicated by other sites. As the main technology behind this...