To this end, you should check out . Pipes, as its name suggests, provides a service that routes data from one or more sources to an output. In its simplest forms you could use a pipe to grab one or more input RSS feeds and merge them into a single output RSS feed. Or you might get fancy and filter the input feeds so only feed items containing, say, the term "oyster" appear in the output feed. (You would, of course, have to name this feed "The World is my Oyster Feed".)

The beautiful thing about Pipes is it is driven by a Web-based graphical user interface that uses drag and drop to arrange functional blocks and draggable connections to wire them together.

For inputs you can use not only RSS, Atom, RDF and iCal feeds, but also CSV, XML, JSON and KML files, the text from whole Web pages or even pull in Flickr photos, Yahoo Local items, Yahoo Search and Google Base data through search queries.

But wait -- there's more! You can also use the (YQL) Web Service (http://tinyurl.com/ncsv4d). YQL provides access to Internet data through SQL-like commands and returns it in XML or JSON format.

You can also add user input (date, time, numeric, text and URL formats) and define private variables, which can be used to store things such as private API keys so if you make the pipe details public your personal data isn't copied.