Senator Ted Stevens has taken a lot of ribbing over his “Series of Tubes” comment in his now infamous speech. There are many entertaining remixes of the occasion on YouTube. Frankly, for me this is a po-ta-toh/po-ta-tah issue because Internet bandwidth is limited, and his speech did reflect the sputtering that the market is experiencing trying to figure out ways monetize Internet content and cope with it’s increasing pervasiveness.

Both tubes and pipes are defined as hollow cylinders used to transfer liquids or gas. Wires are the tubes of the Internet through which the data flow. Their capacity is limited; however, technology and fiber-optic cables are continually increasing the amount of data that can be transfered in a given period of time. Just like increasing pressure can force more water through a hose, data can be compressed to improve performance. This capacity is also known as bandwidth.

Recently, Yahoo! introduced a new service called “Pipes” which draws attention to a different set of pipes on the Internet. In computer programming there is a concept known as piping. It is the technique of using the output of one program as the input to another program. Yahoo! is putting this to use in an Internet context, but what are the inputs and what are the outputs?

One aspect of the Web 2.0 revolution is the concept of the programmable web. At one time, web sites were written in HTML and people looked at them with web browsers. This is still true, but not for much longer. The machines are now talking to each other and people are using widgets and RSS readers to consume Internet content. The languages of the web are becoming XML, JSON (jay-sahn), and XAML (zam-mel). These are the outputs of the new web applications.

The most popular consumable output is probably RSS, which is an XML format for delivering all kinds of content including netcasts (podcasts), videos, photos, articles, weather, search results, you name it. All these outputs or data pipes make great input for the Yahoo! Pipes application.

With Yahoo! Pipes you can select, filter and combine these inputs to create one output that you can consume or share with others.

Here are some examples of pipes that have been made and are available for you to use:

• Merge many news outlets into one concise list of news. [view pipe]
• Find deals on ebay. [view pipe]
• Modify this pipe to monitor news on you favorite subject or even your company name. [view pipe]

You get the idea. If you are not producing an RSS output of your website content then you may miss out on all the users who will be using Pipes to aggregate their content.

Yahoo! is not the first to do this–I have been using feedblendr for a while–but they have definitely raised the bar. Look for more in this space and start thinking of some new ways to use this new service.

There were years of anticipation around the latest release of Microsoft Windows such that the recent official release of Vista seemed a little anti-climatic. However, at least one launch party caught my eye. The photos from the Vista Ice House: Toronto launch party were fun to see. It reminded me of the mysterious Swedish ICEHOTEL which takes ice architecture to the extreme. I have always wondered about certain hygienic aspects of staying at an ice hotel, but I guess the details have been worked out, because now there is an Ice Hotel in Canada as well.