Robin Hamman from the BBC wrote on his personal Cybersoc.com blog today about some aggregation work he's been doing with Yahoo! Pipes. We love what he's up to. (HT: I got the tweet from Rheingold's feed.)

With the rise of so many citizen journalists, Robin is trying to solve the problem of information clutter by filtering through social media sites looking for keywords that might be signals of a real breaking story. By using Pipes, he has built a single RSS feed that searches for a keyword across several social media sites where citizen reports are likely to pop up: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and on blog search engines Technorati and IceRocket.

Using good keywords that could signal a big story -- he picked Explosion, Evacuation, and Bomb to start -- gives him feeds that let him know whenever chatter about one of these terms spikes online. Using a couple other tools that Pipes offers, he's able to do a little extra filtering and make sure he's cutting out as much clutter as possible and still finding the good stuff. Here's a picture of what part of this Pipe looks like:

I made a copy of the Pipe and put it into Managing News to see what it would look like. From this first screenshot, you can see that it's tracking all the right words, even if there is some extra content finding its way in.

Geotagging makes a big difference here. When a news story breaks, you want to know where it's happening. Robin's tool made use of some of the geo-terms on Flickr to map Flickr photos. It's possible to do other geo-tagging on Pipes too using the "Location Builder" tool that creates a location object from a string value of address formats including zipcodes. The picture above shows a map from Managing News. Since the feed was fresh when I took this picture, it doesn't have many stories to map but right away it showed a spike for the United States -- the kind of spike you'd expect to see with a big story. No breaking story yet though: clicking on the U.S. just yielded general stories that included the term "evacuation."

In order make sure I'm taking full advantage of geo-tagging in these situations, I've added "Washington, D.C." to my Watchlist in Managing News so that I get an SMS any time a story from this feed includes Washington, D.C. Good to be safe. ;)

To take the tool to the next level, Robin's working on a way to automatically create new feeds by finding keywords from the BBC News feed, extracting those keywords and then creating new instances of the Pipe. With this running, there would be a new Pipe created for each new keyword that might be related to a breaking story. He'd get alerts in his RSS reader and be able to see if the new term is generating anything useful.

One of the major reasons we built Managing News was to help cut down on information clutter and make it easier to see what's happening in the news without having to read all of it. Pipes is a great tool for people who really want to get into tracking their news carefully because it allows you take RSS feeds, filter, combine, tag, or translate them (and more), and then publish a new single feed with your specifications. We encourage our Managing News clients who are interested in really "digging in" to try it out and put these new feeds into Managing News. Like any tool though, it's only as useful as the user is skilled to use it... Robin is doing some really progressive work with it, and we're excited to see what else he comes up with.