I'm sometimes asked this in reference to my column, because technology is constantly changing and the news is fast-breaking and appearing in many venues. My answer begins in one place but leads to another, quite different outcome, one that a new offering by Yahoo helps us visualize.

So I'll start with data harvesting, but I'm really talking about the future.

When you're trying to track something topical, such as a news story, the first tool to master is RSS, or really simple syndication. RSS lets you subscribe to a Web site so that anything new, such as the latest news story, is sent to you rather than you having to go to the Web page to find it. Lots of news sources use RSS routinely, and although you used to need a special program to read RSS feeds, you can now use built-in browser tools or do it entirely on the Web.

The Web might be the place to begin. Services such as Google Reader (reader.google.com) and Blog lines (blog lines.com) let you choose sites you want to follow and sign up for their syndication services. From then on, the news from these sites flows to you when you log on to the service, with the additional benefit that you can use your feeds from any Internet-connected computer.

So one answer to the question about my column research is that I track several hundred news feeds through Google Reader and check them every day.

Try out RSS and your first reaction might well be to marvel at how easy it is to check on a large number of sources. RSS saves you time. But after a while, you will see some shortcomings and want more.

This is where a new offering, Yahoo Pipes (pipes.yahoo.com), comes in. To explain it, let me set up a scenario.

While working on this column, I used Google Reader to go through about a hundred news sites and Web logs to get the current buzz about Yahoo's latest. But in doing this, I was dependent on the menu structure that Google had put in place, and there were things I could not do.

I would have liked to have searched all those feeds for specific key words, rather than clicking through them one by one, because it's just a fact that when you download hundreds of items every day, you're not going to read them all. What you really want to do is to filter them. I'd like to be able to set up a news channel that says "take all the news stories about Yahoo Pipes and show them to me separately, sorted by date." I might want to add qualifiers, such as excluding certain authors or types of story. I would then like to create a separate RSS feed of just this material. This kind of filtering is what Yahoo Pipes has been created to do.

Get the idea? I want to be able to mix, match and filter RSS feeds to fine-tune what I get. This is what Yahoo Pipes offers. It has a spartan interface that needs work and is not as usable as it should be. But what Yahoo is offering is significant, because RSS is going to grow in importance, and that ability to remix our RSS feeds is gradually going to become a key component of Internet use. It will allow average users to program their own output, using visual tools to make the Web experience far more responsive to their needs.

If you explore Yahoo Pipes, you will find many examples, most of them set up by early adopters. You can explore these, run them or make copies of them to learn how they are put together.

Suppose you are about to travel to France. You could set up a pipe to get the RSS feed from the newspaper Le Monde. You could then filter that feed by serving it to the Babelfish translation engine (babelfish.com), and set up the result as a new feed that comes straight to you, one that gives you all daily Le Monde stories translated into English.

Here's another I like. You can set up a pipe that taps eBay and gives you all auctions involving the item you specify that fall within certain price parameters. Because a pipe provides content as an RSS feed, you would have a constantly updating read on items of interest, such as the 1940s-era Wahl-Eversharp Skyline fountain pens that I'm on the lookout for. The right pipe keeps me current without my having to go to eBay and run time-consuming searches there.

Most of us won't wind up programming many pipes. The beauty of what Yahoo is doing is that the people who know how to program well will put their offerings up for use. The rest of us will make copies of these, perhaps tweak them to adjust their parameters and be able to use the Web as a flexible database, more than a gallery of pages. We're very early in this process, but I think Yahoo Pipes points to a direction that the Net is taking, one that changes the game by giving the user more control over its vast and changing resources. Whatever we wind up calling it, the ability to remix RSS is going to be big.

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