If you have read through the other posts you should now know what RSS is and how to setup a reader, and also how to find the top blogs (and their RSS feeds) and deliver those feeds as an opml file, in a dashboard or as an digest.
Now for something really special… creating your own custom search engine / crawler with Yahoo! pipes. As usual Marshall Kirkpatrick has a great intro to Yahoo! pipes and our friends at Read Write Web have an excellent post to really get us started: Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don’t Use Social Media. Check out section 2, where they discuss Yahoo! pipes. Take a look at this pipe called the ‘Social Media Firehose’ which crawls over 40 sites to bring you mentions of your keyword from all the far flung corners of this great world wide web.
Moving forward you will want to use more powerful pipes and start creating your own. This posts gives you some excellent examples of, and links to pipes that can search twitter, flickr, or all social media sites. For creating your own pipes or if you are interested in more in-depth training you need to check out Dawn Foster’s blog and her posts on pipes. Here is a video she has done where she shows how to build a pipe:
This Yahoo Pipes video series is also available as a podcast on iTunes, and as a separate feed. Again, Dawn is available for consulting, at the very least subscribe to her newsletter.
