as we may blog

Lots of people are chattering on the nets lately about Yahoo Pipes, a new service that lets you take feeds from different sites, mash them together, and presumably, create a richer and more pleasing experience with the result than you could ever hope to enjoy by browsing the feeds individually.

Upon learning that Pipes is capitalizing on the increasingly semantic nature of the web, I seized the opportunity to use Pipes to answer one of the most frequently asked questions I get here at As We May Blog:

"How can I see all the beer-related content from The Content Webring, translated into French and then translated back into English?"

With Yahoo Pipes, I don’t have to spend any more sleepless nights translating content by hand. The answer is now generated automagically and published to the entire world, free of charge: Beer content from The Content Webring.

Original content:

• You think we have it bad?
• Between a Beer and a Hard Place (Sports betting, week 3)
• Dial-a-Brew, Take Two
• Area Drunkard Drunk

Piped content:

• You think that we have it bad?
• Between a Bi? and a hard place (sports betting, week 3)
• Dial-a-Brew, The Catch Two
• Drunkard Of Drunk Sector

Web 3.0. Sense: made.

Something about David Byrne pushing to the front of a recent Arcade Fire show struck me as funny:

Up in the VIP balcony the sound did indeed suck, so I wormed my way to within a few yards of the stage, in front of one of the PA speakers, and it was wonderful. The new songs are grand, personal, apocalyptic and totally heartfelt. Just to see and hear a band that is so obviously playing from the heart and not making career moves was incredibly moving — but of course the songs and arrangements are good, too. Yes, I could hear little bits of Talking Heads in their earlier material and shows — which was flattering — but now I think most of their influences are pretty invisible. They’ve become what they are.

I can’t speak for the sound in the VIP balcony, but he’s completely right about the songs from Neon Bible. Byrne, being much smarter about these things than I, easily identified what is so great about the new songs: they’re masterfully composed, tightly wound, and, truly, totally heartfelt.

I’m not going to make much of an effort to say more than Byrne did above, but I’ve listened to this album about twenty times already and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you’ve got a turntable and decent speakers I think 180g vinyl will really showcase the density and delicacy of the sound, more than it might for other rock albums. Go get this.

On the way to work I got hit in the left eyeball by an ice pellet. You?

I can’t tell you the number of times people approach me in the street and ask, "What were the last ten articles you read on RSS-enabled websites and found interesting, in reverse chronological order?" Well I can’t stop people from asking that question, but I can now point them to the new content chip at the top of the right sidebar. As We May Recommend is a list of the last ten articles I found interesting. Other people provide the content, Google Reader provides the technology: it’s a casual blogger’s dream come true.

Now there’s a reason to visit more than once a month!