Have you a number of online profiles that demonstrate what an interesting, capable, sterling, hardworking, ethical person you are, not to mention your stellar writing skills? Do you think that a prospective employer would perhaps like you better if he or she could easily see a sample of who you really are "in the wild?" The key word is "easily." No one is going to visit six or eight sites and track down your profile on each site. But you can use Yahoo Pipes to create a convenient mashup of who you are, what you do, and what you like, etc., and put it all in a single URL.

You provide the pipe with feeds from your best social networking sites, blogs, or any other sites that publish feeds. You can then mash them all up altogether, filter out anything you don't want in the pipe, sort by recency or otherwise. This is just simple use of pipes. There are many other things you can do but I expect that most pipes users just use it as an RSS feed aggregator in the manner described below.

To use pipes you must have a yahoo account. Once have one you can log in to pipes.yahoo.com

1. Click the CREATE PIPE button which takes you to a graphical drag 'n' drop edit screen.
2. Open the 'Sources' on the left if it is not already.
3. Drag the "Fetch Feed" bar onto the editing grid.
4. Type the RSS feed address you wish to use.
5. Hit the plus icon to add more feeds. Repeat these steps to add as many feeds as you want.
6. Connect the feeds directly to the pipe output bar at the bottom by dragging the mouse from the circle at the bottom of the feed panel to the circle at the top of the output bar.
7. Save the feed as some name, then click the RUN PIPE link at the top of the page.
8. Save the URL that appears in the address bar when your pipe runs. This is the URL that will invoke and bring up your Mega-Me pipe in any web browser.
9. Please note that Twitter feeds are notoriously flaky so my pipe does not include any.
10. If you see duplicate titles cropping up you may wish to insert a filter on uniqueness of titles bar between the feeds and the output bar.