Though my Cool Tools broadcasts featured Yahoo! Pipes, I had so much still to process. This is a tough application. Tim O’Reilly loves it, but warns that it is not “for the faint of heart.”. So very much is possible, but Pipes is like a siren of sorts. There is a wacky learning curve, nice and gentle for a few feet, but it drops in a frightening way. Suddenly there is a sheer drop to a jagged reef.

The tutorials and the videos bring us softly in, so we may create mashups of RSS feeds and such – essentially the same thing we do through subscription to iTunes and Google Reader – and we are promised we may do so much more; and we may. But that so much more is a long way away from where we begin. It is easy to combine syndication sites. It is way difficult to do much more than that. And Pipes can obviously help us do much more than that. Here is a page featuring some of the most popular pipes out there right now. Take a look at the sources. Many of them come close to boggling the mind. And here is the page describing, in some depth, the extensive list of Pipes’ modules. The best descriptive term I have for this documentation is “coy.” There seems to be a certain depth of knowledge already presumed. The module explanations leave something definitely to be desired for the beginner who has already succeeded at RSS mashing, and wants to do something more custom.

But that is alright. Shoot. I know computer snobs who disdain GUIs or any sort, and would laugh at my head-scratching attempts to master the pipes. I think the trick is to use this thing. I worked for years in a litigation support capacity. UNIX was our platform. I learned best by talking to my colleagues and venturing out into the world. Same thing here. After that sheer drop, when we need to know where our surface is, we just need to keep air in our lungs. Look at the sources. Talk to people who live in the waters. Use the application. That is the only way to really use the application. Here are my first two maybe-publishable pipes. The second one is a clone, in fact, and a pretty similar copy to its original.

{“pipe_id”:”FmFLSTa73RGyt3K66icw5g”,”_btype”:”list”}

{“pipe_id”:”86771971c47c5a1fb99479ec2e5933c9″,”_btype”:”map”,”pipe_params”:{“locationinput1″:”Portland, OR”,”textinput1″:”Bookstores”}}