I’m in the San Francisco airport flying back from a wonderful Foo Camp where I lead a discussion about RSS power user tips. It was a lot of fun. Several of the attendees had never used Yahoo! Pipes, one of the most powerful tools in the RSS toolbox. I told them that I too didn’t really learn to use Pipes for a long, long time after I first discovered it because it seemed too complicated for my poor little non-developer’s head. Once I was shown just two buttons to push in the service, though, I found out that some great results are actually very easy to achieve using Pipes. Just seeing some one do the simplest things there makes it a lot less scary. In that same spirit, I offer the following 5 minute screencast demonstrating 3 simple things you can do with Pipes. I hope it emboldens you to learn how to do even more with the service, but even if you only feel comfortable doing this much – I believe it will still prove very, very useful. Plus it will keep your toes safe (you’ll know what I mean after watching the video below.

Update: Give it a try, this video may or may not play for you. It was recorded using Jing Project, an application that’s simple to record with but maddening to use once a video is loaded. I get several emails a day saying I’m approaching the bandwidth limits of my free account. I have no idea how many times it’s been viewed or how close I am to that bandwidth requirement though. I can’t resize the file itself to fit into a smaller player, no one has answered my email requesting information despite previous requests from the company for me to try it out again and apparently the only solution to my problems will be to give them a $160 for a year’s subscription. I think I’ll be trying out ScreenFlow instead. But give it a click below, maybe you can watch this video!