Nothing new under the sun, not even link roundups of the days top stories.

I’ve been a fan of Yahoo Pipes since it was first released to the public. I first used it to combine a number of feeds¹ from sites I contributed to so that my home page was constantly updated with recent work and personal updates. It allowed me to include only my just my posts from sites with multiple authors and to strip the boilerplate and ads tacked on to items. I’ve since used it to prune feeds from sites based on certain criteria or key words to reduce the noise in my feed reader and to experiment with ideas for mashing up or repurposing data from other services.

If you’re still reading, then you probably also know that Yahoo, the company, hasn’t exactly been operating smoothly of late. Many of my friends who once worked there have either quit or gotten pink slips, leading me to joke in an aside to an item about rumors of further layoffs that I would have confirmed the news with my contacts at the company, but I don’t have any left. I understand that new CEO Carol Bartz has her work cut out for her, but her stated mandate to slash parts of the business that aren’t turning a profit scares me.

Why? Because Pipes is free, and while I imagine it isn’t terribly expensive to operate, any costs it generates are strictly revenue-negative. Regardless, though I can’t say for certain there have been significant outages, neither would I assure anyone that it’s speedy or reliable². Nor can I think of any significant new features added, or any further development at all, since it’s been released. So my question is: If you use Pipes, what would you pay to keep it going, assure some degree of dependability, and even fund continued development?

My suggestion for a move to a pay model is based on my love of Flickr. While I often neglect to cough up the $24.95 yearly fee for the pro account thanks to laziness and poverty, I do pay for it, and have since before and after it was acquired by Yahoo. Not really for the features it affords paid users, really, but because it acts as a remote backup for hundreds of photos I’ve taken; was the first application I found, online or off, which made photo metadata so easy to add that it’s almost fun; and thanks to that metadata makes searching, browsing and publishing photos taken by thousands of people from around the world and up to the moment a magically useful experience.

To a certain set of power users, I feel Pipes could offer similar value.

While I have a passing acquaintance with Javascript, Perl and PHP, I’m not familiar enough with the chores like managing RSS feeds or parsing XML that real developers find second nature. But the graphical approach to connecting the input and output of basic data processing routines presented by Pipes was intuitive enough to pick up quite quickly. Even if I haven’t actually followed through, I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought or replied “you could use Pipes for that” when someone describe a publishing problem they were having or a little bit of functionality they wanted.

The only thing that’s stopped me from recommending Pipes or dreaming up innovative uses for it, frankly, is my trepidation that it may stop working or cease to exist entirely on any given day. Yahoo just shut down GeoCities, which after more than a decade as a free, online publishing platform was as hoary an institution as they come on the Internet. My hope is that Pipes is so miniscule, it won’t even register Bartz, the Yahoo board or the constantly re-orged execs as a line item on the budget. Even then, it’s only a matter of time until some consultant from the likes of McKinsey does notice it and sounds the “wasteful spending” alarm.

I’m writing this in the hopes of pre-empting that eventuality, maybe giving Pipes fans and afficionados a platform in the comments, and suggesting that I, at least, would be willing to pay a nominal fee for the peace of mind provided by the knowledge that Pipes would not only live but even thrive if administered a hot cash injection. I’m also writing this because after a splashy release with plenty of publicity from tech journalists, I haven’t seen it mentioned in months if not years.

I’m willing to start the bidding at $10 (Okay, $9.95) a year. What about you: Do you use Yahoo Pipes? Are the features you’d wish to see? Have you found the service spotty or even broken on occassion? How much would you pay for the current level of service and function to be maintained? And would you pay more if you knew Yahoo would actually devote some resources to improving it? Or am I just an idiot for not knowing a better solution offering similar utility, much less relying on a Yahoo product at all?

1. I was so proud of myself, I was about to send it as a suggestion to then Lifehacker editrix Gina Trapani only to find she’d already been there, done that and written the tutorial weeks before. I actually did end up writing for Lifehacker, albeit briefly. And of course Gina’s now beating me and many others to the good idea punch at Smarterware.

2. My pipes feed does go through Feedburner — which, like Flickr, was another great service that ended up devoured by a Valley monster. In this case, Google. I admit to having some trouble isolating the problem when updates to my personal site seemed delayed or don’t appear at all. Pipes, Feedburner, Flickr, Twitter or one of any number of CMS systems could be to blame in any given case.

Hilarious advertising, via my old comrade Nicholas Carlson. I can’t count how many times the vagaries of Soviet toilet paper (or lack there of) have been cited as an example of why anything besides unfettered free markets are doomed to fail.

Anyway, have been quiet of late thanks to the collapse of said unfettered free markets indirectly leaving me hustling for work. Speaking of which, I’ve updated my home page and my about page to reflect some new publications and sites I can be found at.

And I promise even more soon, even though blogging is apparently killing the very business of writing I try to make a living in. Good times all around.

If Barack Obama is really a progressive candidate and not just the new face of the business interests that truly rule Washington, then together with the Democrats that now reign as a party there are some clear goals I’d like to see worked toward:

1. Stop the drug war: Obama can’t do anything about mandatory sentencing or funding drug treatment programs as opposed to incarceration — much of that is left up to the states. What he can do is stop funding intervention and eradication efforts in countries around the world, especially in Central and South America. No more crop-spraying, no more money for paramilitary juntas, no more federal funds for local police departments to pursue American citizens at home who are criminalized for using and abusing drugs and the expansion of the world’s largest prison system.
2. End the other wars (and don’t start any new ones): The war in Iraq was, from the start, an imperialist war of aggression and in no way any effort to liberate anyone from anything (except maybe the Iraqis from their oil). Afghanistan is a little more complicated, but again, why is the United States cleaning up the messes made by the British Empire? The thought of broadening that conflict to Waziristan, within the borders of a nuclear-armed Pakistan, scares the living shit out of me. Yet Obama has made it perfectly clear in his speeches that this is exactly what he plans to do.
3. Solve the deficit by reducing military spending: If you want to reduce taxes, increase spending on healthcare and education while reducing the budget deficit and not significantly increasing the tax burden, you’re going to have to cut the money spent on the military. The Keynesian spending of the New Deal never did end — the money just went into the defense industry instead of the WPA.
4. Do make war on corporate welfare and tax evasion:From $700 billion bailout packages to massive tax credits to offshore accounts, Obama can veto more handouts to large corporations and keep the income due to the treasury from flowing into offshore havens. The IRS and the DOJ need to lead the way, combined with a congressional rewrite of the tax code to excise loopholes, would do much to get the wealthy to pay what they owe. If they did, then you could probably reduce taxes in the long run for everybody.
5. Abide the rule of law: The Guantanamo Bay detention center needs to be shut down today. If there are actual concerns that detainees are threats to society, then they should be tried in the appropriate jurisdictions by applicable local laws and amongst their peers. Illegal extradition worldwide and the suspension of habeus corpus domestically needs to end now, along with wiretapping and the quixotic quest for an omniscient security state.
6. Prosecute war criminals and profiteers: Obama has an opportunity to appoint a new Attorney General, and that appointee should go after military leadership, independent contractors like Blackwater and White House officials who aided and abetted war crimes, from torture to the rape and murder of innocent civilians. Same goes for corruption in awarding defense contracts and prosecution of corporate collaborators in domestic spying programs. American exceptionalism when it comes to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in the Hague needs to end.
7. Roll back expansion of executive power and privilege: Stop the practice of “presidential signing statements” and stop claiming “national security” to cover up corruption and abuses of power. The expansion of executive power under the Bush administration severely damaged the system of checks-and-balances. The president’s role is to enforce the will of legislators elected by voters, not rule by fiat. My worry is that the Democratic party, once it inherits the powers the Republicans claimed for themselves in the last eight years, will be more than happy to run with it.
8. Keep corporate interests out of foreign policy: From demands for liberalized economies to demands for new intellectual property laws, not to mention ignoring human rights abuses in places like China and Russia to keep cheap goods flowing new markets open for exploitation, business interests need to take a back seat in diplomatic negotiations and let human rights, economic justice, environmental concerns and peaceful resolutions to international disputes lead.
9. Free Cuba from the embargo: It’s not helping us, and it’s actively hurting Cubans. The policy of containment was and is an ongoing joke. And the entire Monroe Doctrine that gives America the self-declared right to indirectly rule the entire Western Hemisphere should probably be put to bed (and the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war strangled in its crib). Meanwhile, the practice of supporting petty dictators through financial and military assistance, covertly or overtly, needs to stop if America wants to honestly have any pretension to “spreading democracy.”
10. Support education, healthcare, food security, transportation and affordable housing: These things need to be assured, if not guaranteed, for the American people. When possible, the new administration should throttle the flow of wanton privatization and stem the ebb of the public commons. The changing tide should lift all boats, not be another trickle-down tsunami swamping the smallest while the largest surf the crest.

If Obama and the Democratic majorities in the house and senate move to achieve these goals, then and only then will you find me dancing in the streets. Hell, just putting a national end to the barbarous nightmare of the death penalty would be enough to get me canvassing and phone-banking in 2012.