Yahoo recently launched 'pipes' (beta). What on earth are yahoo pipes? - well it's quite a cool internet based application which allows you to 'mash' the web. Which basically means that you can do clever things with RSS feeds to mix together content from different websites. I wasn't really all that excited about pipes when I first read about it. I've never seen a 'web mash up' which has been either interesting or useful. So pipes, although having a very impressive user interface, seemed like a bit of a waste of time.
That was until I was driving home last night, stuck in traffic, and I thought - I wonder if I could use pipes to give me traffic information for my daily commute? I drive through Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, and use the A46 and M40. The BBC traffic RSS feeds are organised by county, and just display all the roads affected. So I created a pipe that searches for traffic problems on the roads I use, for the counties I drive through. It outputs a single RSS feed, which I can add to my google desktop homepage. I know, I know - I'm cool.
Preview my pipe
