I confess to not fully understanding this piece of gizmotastic wizardry, but I think its a kind of glorified super-feed with a catchy name. Whatever it is, the FamilyLawPipe appears to feature my face on it and is driving people to this blog. I must explore this newfangled pipery properly at some stage… In the meantime I have managed (with a small amount of assistance from the Geek on the sofa) to insert a borrowed Pipe thingybob on my sidebar for your delectation – thanks Nick Holmes.
Useful things, these pipes. I borrowed Nick’s EWCA Crim pipe to knock up ones for the Civil appeals and Admin court lists, which I’m running on Nearly Legal but it looks like Nick has done his own more refined versions. These pipes are basically just a filter on Bailii’s recent decisions RSS feed. Nick’s family law pipe is an aggregation of 14 family law blogs and news, using their RSS feeds.
Subject based aggregation is a very useful thing, I think – 14 sites in one handy self-updating package that can itself be used for all sorts of things. Fun in a geeky kind of way.
I started something with a pipe, thinking it was a brilliant idea, but now I have to go back tinker a bit more with my “brilliant” idea. If one idea of blogging is transmitting ideas, then I think these pipes are a good idea. Seems to me like a blogroll on steriods.