Web 2.0: Social Media Firehose

All I can say is, “Wow!” I just read a post by Ann Smarty over at SearchEngineJournal.com about some very cool Yahoo pipes that you can run. (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-useful-yahoo-pipes-to-monitor-your-brand/14320/: “5 Useful Yahoo! Pipes to Monitor Your Brand”)

For those of you who don’t know what Yahoo Pipes is it’s an aggregator for different types of content. For example, they’ll take several feeds and put them together, either to ...

make specialized reports or for publishing on blogs or elsewhere. They allow you to mashup lots of stuff and make it really cool.

For example, I read several SEO blogs and instead of having to go to all of them, I have a Yahoo Pipe that gives me everything at a glance. My Pipe is called “SEO Goodness Pipe” and you can find it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=YsYIE89w3hGA4vj2BNV6qA" class="reaction_link" target="_blank">http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=YsYIE89w3hGA4vj2BNV6qA. The reason I call it that is because I also use the pipe to send interesting SEO stuff to Twitter every hour or so.

People love it, and retweet the stuff I send out all the time. I’m finding myself on people’s Twitter lists and it’s a great deal all the way around. I made the Pipe, people get to read the same cool stuff I love on Twitter. They’re happy, I get more followers, they retweet, and the circle goes ’round and ’round.

But the Social Media Firehose is a Pipe that will run your brand on several different social sites, and it’s much better than Google Alerts. It taps directly into the APIs of the social sites and brings results from Flickr, Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed and who knows where else. It’s pretty cool to run your blog and see just where your stuff is showing up around the Web. It’s a great way to see how your brand is doing in terms of virulence and social impact.

Anyway, there are four other cool tools in Ann’s post for you to check out that will tell you where you stand in the socialverse. I found the Social Media Firehose to be the most interesting for me, but you may be able to make use of the others. They’re all pretty cool.

Yahoo Pipes is totally cool. If you don’t check it out, well… Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com and see how they might benefit you!

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