yahoo’s new pipes allow you to play a little more with the internet by creating your own aggregators of web content (i.e. find an apartment for rent near a park) through a quasi-intuitive graphical interface where the sources of information, operators and user inputs are windows connected by pipes. the programming language works kind of like LEGO mindstorms’ or scratch, where parts of code are represented as building blocks with specific roles picked from a catalog and arranged geometrically on the screen. researchers proposing an analytic method could one day code it into such a program and evaluate it by having it used by a community of their peers.