News feeds help you stay current, but they're time-consuming to read. If you're looking for a needle in the RSS haystack, Yahoo's powerful and free Pipes construction set (pipes.yahoo.com) enables you to pour feeds through doz¬ens of prefabricated logic modules that search, modify, or analyze them and then pump the result through other modules and services to output the fine-tuned result. Building your own feed is a drag¬and-drop affair. Click the Documenta¬tion link on the home page to reach a tutorial, online help, and sample pipes that show you how to mix and match modules.

To build a pipe, use your Yahoo ID to sign in at the Pipes home page, and click Create a pipe to open the Pipes editor. Select a module from the 'User inputs' or 'Sources' categories (such as Fetch Feed to add an RSS feed) on the left side of the editing screen, and drag it onto your page. Next, pick a module from 'Operators', 'String', or another data¬manipulation category and drag it onto the page. Enter the necessary filtering information. Next, drag from the "port" on the bottom of the box to connect the output ofthe first module to the input of the second, and the output of the second to the input of the Pipe Output module at the bottom of the page.

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When you're done, click Save, and then Run Pipe to use your finished pipe. Finally, click Publish to share your pipe with the world. By connecting several news feeds to the 'For Each: Replace' module (which contains the Flickr source module), I built a pipe that illus¬trates what many of the products reported on look like, along with some occasionally unexpected results. I even managed to filter out duplicate images by introducing the 'Unique' module. The really ingenious pipes are much more complex, however.