Over the weekend I was looking for a blog with a post that was tagged “edtech” but had “video” in the description. Technorati has an advanced search feature that permits searching either the description or the tags. You cannot do both at the same time.
I remembered hearing about Yahoo Pipes in a podcast. This web-based drag-and-drop “programming” environment will let you create your own mashup of sites that use RSS. All you need is a free Yahoo account.
If you are the type of person that learns by “seeing” what other people have done, start with someone else’s pipe. All the pipes that are published are available to edit. If you see something that someone else has done that is similar to what you need, make a copy of it and modify it to fit your needs.
Here is what I came up with.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=iDswoM3e2xGqPvxGlfXiAA
As of right now, there are three hits on my search. It would have taken a long time to manually sift through the more than 3000 blogs with posts tagged as “edtech”. Less than 0.1% of them had the keyword I was looking for. My mashup lets me easily find a needle in a haystack.