Meanwhile, in altoona…

John has created this here Yahoo! News Tag Soup dealio.

After discovering the Content Analysis web service I decided it would be fun to see what Yahoo! thought the important keywords would be from it’s own news feeds. I was also interested to see if I could use some simple analysis to see what the ‘hot’ keywords were.

By tapping into the Yahoo! web services, I have access to all kinds of content and search functionality. What used to be accomplished through dirty screen scraping hacks can now be done easier, quicker, and legitimately though a REST interface that can be implemented in most any programming language. The end effect is that people much smarter than me can mash web content into interesting ways that the original authors never intended.

John is up to interesting stuff these days, make sure to read his “How does this work?” page, and keep your eyes peeled for more new kung-fu from them ninja.