Unofficial Google Moderator API powered by YQL
Over the last few months, Google Moderator has become increasingly popular among groups across the internet as a tool for collecting ideas. It’s simply a great general-purpose app for collecting ideas and crowd-sourcing the rankings and has the mass appeal that eluded Bix and Amazon’s Unspun experiment.
Google Moderator could be even more useful if all of the community-driven rankings it tabulates could be used to drive content on other sites. One example is the “Ask the Expert” site format, a la AskTom (I developed Oracle applications in a former life), where a list of user-submitted questions are regularly hand-picked by an expert for answering. This works fine, except I’ve often wondered if more AskTom readers would be better served by having the most popular questions answered first. This could be done by collecting and ranking the questions via Moderator and regularly fetching the latest list of top-ranked questions via the Google Moderator API.
The only problem with using the Google Moderator API is that there isn’t one (yet). Following Kent Brewster‘s lead, I rolled my own Google Moderator API using YQL (Yahoo Query Language) and Open Data Tables. If you’re not familiar with YQL, it’s an extremely flexible and powerful way fetch data from any number of sources from the web. A genius move on Yahoo’s part was to allow anyone to extend YQL’s reach with user submitted data tables for data sources that YQL is unfamiliar with. I simply had to write a Google Moderator data table to make the data fetchable via YQL, and bingo, we now have an unofficial API for Google Moderator!
With my data table published, I can now run a query in YQL to fetch the data from one of my Google Moderator topics:
use ‘http://shawnshah.com/files/google.moderator.xml’ as gmod; select * from gmod where url=’http://productideas.appspot.com/#15/e=2016b&t=2016c&f=251ef’ and offset=0
Now I can fetch the most popular ideas and publish them to a web page or remix them with other data with Pipes!
Maybe Tom Kyte will eventually rewire the AskTom like this 
UPDATE: Here is example pipe that fetches the list of ideas/questions submitted to a Google Moderator topic.
