I wanted a way to aggregate my posts and bookmarks in various places, or create a mash-up of my feeds all over the web, into my Personal Learning Environment. Many people call this a Lifestream. Besides the obvious vanity factor, I'll use it to help review and reflect on what I've learned.

Steve Rubel does it nicely on tumblr and I gave it a try. Not wanting to incorporate another blog app into the mix and needing to put together more than five feeds, I thought I'd take the opportunity to fiddle with Yahoo Pipes.

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

I was a fan of Pipe's New Media Buzz Tracker for aggregated topic searching (mentioned here) and wanted to learn to create one myself. I found a good tutorial over at ZDnet, and it didn't take to long to come up with my own.


A finished Pipe will easily install in almost all of the major start pages or readers, but I routed the RSS through Feedburner for the extended publishing options.

Viola! Check the sidebar on the front page for "mlx-o-matic" to see more of my posts from del.icio.us, digg, flickr, ning, twitter, last.fm, youtube, and blogger.

Yes, it might be vain, but in a Personal Learning Environment I like to think of it as self-centered ownership. :)

• update 12/5/07: Library Clips has an excellent post on Read/Write lifestreams.
• update: 4/30/08: several feeds have been added or adjusted in the stream: cocomments tracks my conversations and comments on other blogs, a Twitter digest Pipe, and (since gReader's feed doesn't port very well) a Google Shared Items Pipe .
• update 6/29/08: Added my internal FriendFeed posts since I'be been playing over in that sandbox lately.
• update 9/8/08: Using the Badge feature available with this Pipe based on my FriendFeed activity, I've incorporated this into it's own page for the redesign. Also added Goodreads and Slideshare to the mix.