To know how a particular brand /product is performing in the market, it’s
important for the organization concerned to keep track of what is being said by
its consumers online. The social media has opened up the online world where
people can give feedbacks, reviews and comments about any company, product or
services. Such feedbacks and comments however, can make or mar the brand or the
company itself.

To manage the online reputation of your brand, you can subscribe to RSS feeds
to get regular updates from social networking sites, forums, search result
pages, etc. For instance, if you want to find out information about your brand
on a particular news site, you do a simple search on that site and subscribe to
the RSS feed of the result page. With almost every website offering RSS
facility, RSS feeds have become a convenient way to check for updates on a
particular web page. It’s most likely that you’ll subscribe to multiple RSS
feeds to ensure you get to know more about your brand through comments and
feedbacks. However, it becomes cumbersome at times to manage multiple feeds from
various websites. Here comes Yahoo Pipes to your rescue.

Yahoo Pipes is an interactive tool that lets you combine various RSS feeds
into one aggregate feed. By combining various RSS feeds, you can have a
consolidated feed thus making it easier to follow-up the online buzz.

Here, we demonstrate how you can get information about a brand (PCQuest, in
our case) from three different sources and aggregate them into one single RSS
feed. We will use Google News, Twitter and PCQuest website to subscribe to the
RSS feeds of these sites.

Do a search for ‘PCQuest’ on Google News page and from the results page, copy the RSS URLs into Notepad. We’ll be using this URLs with Yahoo Pipe to fetch various RSS feeds.

On Twitter’s search box, enter ‘PCQuest’ and from the search results page, copy the URL of link ‘RSS feed for this query’ and paste it on Notepad. Similarly, get another RSS URL from pcquest.com.

Sign into Yahoo Pipes login page and click on ‘Create a Pipe’ button. The library pane on left lists the modules that can be dragged on the canvas area to create a pipe.

Drag the ‘Fetch Feed’ module from the sources list on left and drop it on the canvas. Once the module is created, another module called ‘Pipe Output’ gets created, to give the final output.

Copy and paste the RSS links from the Notepad into the text boxes. Click on ‘+ sign to create text boxes for more URLs. For each URL, the favicon is fetched automatically by the module.

Click on the blue circle of Fetch Feed box and drag it to the blue circle of the Pipe Output box to join the two modules. Now save the project as pcqdemo by clicking on ‘Save’.

Click on ‘Run Pipe’ option to execute the project. A new window will display the list of aggregated feeds of ‘pcqdemo’ pipe.

Customize the Pipe URL by clicking on ‘edit’ and name the pipe as pcqdemo. Using http://pipes.yahoo.com/pcqpipe/pcq demo, you can access the feeds aggregated by ‘pcqdemo’ pipe.