I’m a technologist and a privacy advocate at heart. Along with extensive coding and programming, I have always loved re-engineering and re-purposing technologies for fun and learning. As an undergraduate student, an intern at Microsoft or a software engineer at Cisco, I would participate in “Hack Days”, where I re-purposed some existing technologies for interesting use-cases. One of the examples is below.
Knowledge Aggregation using Yahoo! Pipes
India is home to hundreds of trivia/quiz bloggers, who upload questions about a multitude of interesting topics. However, in the late 2000s, this resource wasn’t streamlined, i.e., there wasn’t a single place to find all of the trivia questions posted by these bloggers. Being an active quizzer who relied on this information, I decided to do something about this — I used the Yahoo! pipes technology to aggregate all content, and programmatically edit the title to attribute the questions to the right blogger as well as the proper dates.
I came up with this idea while participating at a Yahoo! Hack Day competition.
The initial uptake was so good, I created a Trivia/Quiz Portal around this idea. I shut this portal down with the shutting of the Yahoo! Pipes technology but here is an archived glimpse of QuizBlog Portal