Here's a good example of Pipes in action - a badge generator so that you can incorporate a newsfeed into your own site:
http://kentbrewster.com/badge-any-feed-with-pipes
(found via Simon Willison: http://simonwillison.net/) 

Good question about measuring newsfeed usage. The only way I could thiink of to estimate usage would to filter your web server logs for requests to the newsfeed URLs. I don't know how you would measure who's using them, or how they're being used, though. You could maybe look at the user-agent and referer headers in the requests, to see what's downloading your feed and where the requests are coming from in the case of embedded widgets like the one above.

If someone reads our content without actually visting our sites, to we still measure them as web site visitors?

Jim

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On 
>Behalf Of Ridge, Mia
>Sent: 21 February 2007 11:13
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Yahoo Pipes - a new challenge for museums?
>
>Bill Thompson has written about Yahoo Pipes in 'The mash-up 
>future of the web' at  
><http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6375525.stm> 
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6375525.stm
> 
>If you haven't heard of Pipes before, this is a reasonable summary:
>
>"Their new offering, Pipes, lets you take a data feed such as 
>the result of a web search, or an RSS feed from a blog or news 
>site, or a set of tagged photos on Flickr, and transform it to 
>produce the outcome you want. You can then make it available 
>for other people to see. 
> 
>It's web-based, no more complicated than creating programs for 
>Lego MindStorms, and already stirring up a lot of interest. 
>..
>Yahoo!'s Pipes do the same with a simple graphical tool that 
>lets you define and connect data feeds, filters and user 
>prompts, so that you can quickly build the service you want. 
>You still need some technical ability, but you don't need to 
>be a programmer."
>
>The Pipes site is http://pipes.yahoo.com/
> 
>My first thought was 'cool, let's make sure our feeds are in a 
>compatible format so people can use our data' and my second 
>thought was 'how on earth will we measure usage?'.  
> 
>It would be cool to know who's using our data and how, but 
>overall, do we need to measure how it's used and how often 
>it's accessed?  Given that we probably can't anyway, are there 
>other potentially useful indicators of use?  Would use of our 
>data in a mash-up affect our museums' performance indicators?
> 
>I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how the ability to take 
>our data as one of many sources and produce something new with 
>it could benefit or disadvantage museums.
> 
>cheers, Mia
>
>
>Mia Ridge
>Database Developer, Museum Systems Team
>Museum of London Group
>46 Eagle Wharf Road
>London. N1 7ED
>Tel: 020 7410 2205
>Fax: 020 7600 1058
>Email: [log in to unmask]
>www.museumoflondon.org.uk

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