If you like local politics, bureacracy and a drawn-out waiting game — tune into San Francisco’s ongoing Wi-Fi plans. I did yesterday, and spent three hours sitting through the city’s Budget and Finance Committee meeting, watching community advocates fight and supervisors play politics. One things for sure, the plans are as on-hold as ever, despite the initial approval.

A resolution requiring a more thorough study of citywide broadband options has made it through committee, and now awaits a vote by the full Board of Supervisors in two weeks. If passed, this resolution would delay any finalization of the contract with Google and Earthlink for at least a “couple of months,” according to Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who sponsored the resolution.

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I’ve been itching to put together a bunch of mashups, but there’s only so many lazyweb requests you’re allowed to make if you can’t grok AJAX. Yahoo’s just-launched Pipes promises to blur the lines between nerds and geeks — offering the powers of developer nerds to content geeks, and vice versa. Tim O’Reilly is nearly verklempt, and even after my friend Kevin Cheng hinted at how the transcendently awesome the project he was working on might turn out, I’m still surprised. It’s like a visual Ruby on Rails. (UPDATE: The Pipes site is not online as of Thursday morning. We’ll check with Yahoo to see what’s up.)

That said, I could be caught up in my own imagination, and nobody’s had much time to play with what Yahoo is calling “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator.” But tools you can play with are always my favorite tools.

Full-size screenshots below the jump.

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By Jackson West

Robert Yeager of Atlanta-based Cooqy feels there are problems with eBay’s feedback system. “eBay users have two personas — one as a Buyer, one as a Seller. eBay’s feedback forces a singular system for two competing interests. As a Buyer, I have to be worried about a seller retaliating against my feedback. This has personally happened to me where a seller shipped me a counterfeit Sony memory stick — I dared not leave a negative feedback b/c he was doing that to other buyers who complained.” In the new tagging system built into the eBay browser, “Tags can have a positive or negative disposition, a tag type (i.e. ‘counterfeit’), and a long 1024-character ‘reason’ — eBay’s shortened feedback length is another area of frustration. Another twist is the ability to tag fair prices for items and shipping.” Members can police the system by out-voting negative feedback with positive feedback.

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