One of my first product evaluations (way back in July!!) was a web RSS creator called Dapper.  And I still use it from time to time, but this week I’ve been playing with a similar product from Yahoo called Yahoo Pipes.  I’m just beginning to scratch the surface with Pipes, but I can tell this is something that I wished I would have been learning a long time ago.  

The basic idea behind Yahoo Pipes is that is gives you “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.  And, I love mashups!!  Since I spent last week listing out a whole bunch of Blogs from NLJ 250 firms, I thought that Yahoo Pipes would be a great resource to use to actually start pulling the different blogs together, based on their common themes.  I decided to pull all of the “Environomental” blogs together to create a mashup that listed all of the recently published postings from those blogs.  
I found eight workable (those that had working RSS feeds) environmental blogs on my list:
Akin Gump ClimateIntel
Baker & Daniels Climate News Live
Holland & Hart Climate Change Law Blog
Saul Ewing Climate Change
Thompson & Knight Law and the Environment
Yahoo Pipes allows you to combine these into one result and filter those results how you like them.  Following the instructions, I ended up with a Yahoo Pipes diagram that looked like this:

If you’re comfortable with RSS or XML (or even setting up a Google Reader gadget), then it isn’t rocket science to set up Yahoo Pipes to do the same thing for you (plus, give you some additional options.)
So, voila!  Here is the output of my very basic, but still effective Yahoo Pipes NLJ 250 Environmental Law Blogs: