Yahoo Pipes and the Semantic Web
I haven't seen such a powerful and fast tool for creating useful information EVER. In short, pipes allow you to mix, search, and filter RSS feeds. See http://pipes.yahoo.com I'm probably bugging their staff with my suggestions, but the potential is enormous for this tool.
Here is a timely pipe I made about the disaster in Southern California. It gives you a map showing story locations about the wildfires. Also includes related video and photos from flickr on the disaster http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=RIuSHE6C3BGakzE3JphxuA This took about 2 hours to pull together, and most of that time was spent finding the right news RSS feeds.
So what is the semantic web? It's all about giving meaning to web content so that a computer can understand and process it. Why? This makes it easier for people to find and use information. RSS and XML in general are tools for enabling it. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ provides more info.
There are other web mashup tools out there- Google mashup editor, Intel mashmaker (http://mashmaker.intel.com))- I'll hit them all.
Want more mashups? Check out http://www.programmableweb.com
Did I mention I was addicted to yahoo pipes?
