John Battelle on a Community driven Yahoo! Pipes project: Read Tim O'Reilly.

In my previous post I tried to start a community initiative for creating services based on Yahoo! pipes. I tried a couple of different approaches to kick start this project and when I failed, I decided to try to mail a couple of people about it. One of the people I mailed was John Battelle, Chairman, Federated Media.

My mail:

Hey John,

I have a small blog ( http://search-search-and-searchme.blogspot.com/ ) and I am trying to pull together a community that could, together, come up with services based on Yahoo! Pipes.

I was hoping you could give me your ideas on an initiative such as this:

1. Whats your take on the new service - Yahoo! pipes? What do you think its impact on user generated content will be?
2. Do you think a it is possible to build a community that works on Yahoo! Pipes services? If so what do you think is the best way to build such a community?
3. You seem to have written off Google Co-op, but at the same time seem to be quite happy with Alexa opening up their crawl ( a beta version of which was around for a while ). Why is that? Don't you think that the implementation ease of Google Coop can make it more useful than Alexa?
4. How do you think Google Coop and Yahoo pipes can be used in conjunction?

Hoping to hear from you

Harish TM

And here is John's reply:

Hi Harish

I am not a developer, so I'm not the best person to answer. I've not written GC off, just waiting to see something neat. Pipes - read Tim O'Reilly on it. I like the idea a lot.

------------------

John Battelle

Chairman, Federated Media: http://federatedmedia.net

Searchblog: http://battellemedia.com/

Great... So I have mailed Tim O'Reilly on it... Lets hope he replies...


I also sent a similar mail to Erin Brenner, Copy Chief & Associate Editor, ClickZ * Incisive Media Plc. and here is his response:

Hi, Harish. Thanks for your e-mail. However, you'll need to direct your
query to one of our Experts for an answer:
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=experts.

Kind regards,
Erin


Erin Brenner
Copy Chief & Associate Editor
ClickZ * Incisive Media Plc.
erin@clickz.com * www.clickz.com

Mailed them too... Lets see what they say...

And to Krishna Kumar, Project Manager, Ivesia Solutions who gave some interesting insights:

Hi Harish

Nice to see your email. Hope you are doing fine. I think one way of building a community is to add more content to your blog about Yahoo! Pipes and then use Technorati, Digg and Google Blogsearch to drive traffic to your site. You could create a Yahoo or Google Group to create the developer community and provide a link on your home page.

Regards

Krish

Visit me at http://www.krishami.com & http://krishami.blogspot.com

Thanks Krishna.

So here is the ( so far empty ) Google group - http://groups.google.com/group/yahoo-pipes---community-development
Yahoo! pipes does not require any technical expertise so please sign up even if you have non of that...

I intent to add further content about Yahoo! pipes on that group to avoid making this a Yahoo! Pipes site.

Also if you are interested in Co-managing that group, please let me know - Additional perspectives will, I am sure, be an advantage.