Creating An Ego Feed With Yahoo Pipes

For those of you at the Blogher Advanced Social Media session last weekend in Chicago, you’ll recall one of the panelists mention of using Yahoo Pipes to find out what others are saying about you and your brand.

But with no explanation of how to do it, I realize it may have left some of you wishing they would have done a demo.  So for those of you who may not understand how to use Yahoo Pipes, here’s a step-by-step guide to building your ego feed with Yahoo Pipes.

Creating A Yahoo Pipes Account

To create a Yahoo Pipes account, simply visit http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ and click “Create a Pipe”.  If you’re not logged into yahoo with your yahoo id, then you need to login.  If you do not have a yahoo pipes account, you obviously need to create one then return to Yahoo Pipes and go from there.

Setting Up Your Yahoo Pipes  Canvas

When you click “Create a Pipe” and have logged in with your Yahoo Id, you’ll see a screen like the following and will be utterly confused as to what you’re supposed to do.

From this screen, click on the plus sign beside “Feed Auto-Discovery” in the left hand panel under “Sources”, and drag the box that shows up to another location on your canvas.  Do this 2 more times.

Then click the plus sign beside the “Fetch Feed” button which is just under the “Feed Auto-Discovery” button.  Drage the box to a blank location on your canvas.  Then do this one more time.

Now choose the “Operators” category and click the plus sign beside “Union”.

Now click the plus sign beside “Sort”.

When all of these steps are complete you should have a workspace that looks something like this:

Grabbing Your Many Ego Feeds

There are so many places that you can use to find what people are saying about you and your brand it’s often-times hard to keep track of them all.  So we’re only starting with the most popular places and you can always add more later.

1. Google Blog Search

Simply visit http://blogsearch.google.com/ and type the following in the search box: link:www.yourdomain.com

Then copy the url in your browser’s address bar and paste it into one of your “Feed Auto-Discovery” boxes on your Yahoo Pipes canvas.

2. Yahoo Search

Visit www.yahoo.com and type the following in the search box: link:www.yourdomain.com

Choose “Except from this domain” in the “Show Inlinks” option. And choose “Entire Site” from the “to” dropdown option.

Then copy the url in your browser’s address bar and paste it into one of your “Feed Aut0-Discovery” boxes on your Yahoo Pipes canvas.

3. Bing Search

Visit www. bing.com and type the following in the search box: “www.yourdomain.com” -site:www.yourdomain.com

Then copy the url in your browser’s address bar and paste it into one of your “Feed Aut0-Discovery” boxes on your Yahoo Pipes canvas.

4. Twingly

Visit www.twingly.com and type the following in the search box: link:www.yourdomain.com

Click the “Subscribe to RSS” link on the right side of the results window.

Then copy the url in your browser’s address bar and paste it into one of your “Fetch Feed” boxes on your Yahoo Pipes canvas.

5. Twitter Search

Visit http://search.twitter.com and search for any words that would pertain to you, such as “@yourusername“.

In the results window, click the “Feed for this query” option on the right.

Then copy the url in your browser’s address bar and paste it into one of your “Fetch Feed” boxes on your Yahoo Pipes canvas.

To add more search results from Twitter simply click the plus sign beside “URL” in your “Fetch Feed” box to add another line to paste an additional url.  You can do this an unlimited number of times.

Finalizing Your Yahoo Pipes Creation

In your “Sort” box, type “item.pubDate” and choose “Descending” for the order.  This will sort your results by the publish date and display them newest first.

Then click on the small circles under each “Feed” box and connect a line to the circles on top of the “Union” box.

When all circles are connected, connect the bottom circle of the “Union” box to the top circle of the “Sort” box and finally from the bottom circle of the “Sort” box to the top circle of the “Pipe Output” box.

Your Yahoo Pipes creation is now complete and it’s time to save and get your feed.  Your creation should look something like this:

Grabbing Your Yahoo Pipes RSS Feed

Click the save button in the upper right of the canvas workspace and choose a name for your feed.

When your creation is saved you will see an option that says “Run pipe…” at the top of your browser window.  Click this link and your pipe will run.

Then choose the subscribe option you want on the created page.

That’s all there is to it.  It takes some time and a little effort, but from now on, anything anyone says about you or your brand will be sent to your feed reader.

You can also perform other searches in each search engine for your desired search terms and add them to your “Feed Auto-Discovery” boxes as well.

Have fun and let me know if this was a big help for you in creating your own Ego Feed.