Yahoo! Pipes

My capsule review of Yahoo! Pipes: Awesome! It's a web based tool for wiring together data from various places on the web (RSS Feeds, Google Base, Yahoo! Search), performing operations on them (combine, truncate, filter, translate etc) and then publish the result. You can imagine lots of other types of data sources lke events from calenders and different types of operators like digesting. I wonder if at some point, I'll be able to build a My Yahoo! page in Pipes. At this point, Pipes still seems to be geared towards webheads but it's pretty easy to use. Congratulations to the Pipes team on doing a really nice job! Tim O'Reilly writes about pipes here.

Help find Jim Gray with Amazon Mechanical Turk

The coast guard has had to call off the search for Jim Gray which I mentioned in a previous post - this is understandable, they did more than they could reasonably be expected to. As a testament to the impact that Jim has had on the technology community, the search continues and now everyone can help. From Werner Vogels blog:

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

So where do you come in? Follow the link to review satellite images and flag possible sightings.