Dapper is a US company with offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Founded by Eran Shir and Jon Aizen in late 2005, Dapper aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website. By doing so, we hope to allow others to realize their creativity and implement new and exciting services and applications.
“Dapper is a new service. You may have noticed that there are many of those emerging these days. Dapper, however, is different. It’s a new kind of service.” says dapper people in their blog.
Dapper allows any content owner to easily tap into new means of distributing content on the web such as RSS feeds and widgets. Using the “Distribute Your Content” service, you can easily create RSS feeds, widgets, Google Gadgets, image loops and other feed formats for your audience to enjoy. Embedding these new content tools in your site is as easy as copy and paste.
Dapper allows you extract data and create a web service out of ANY webpage. No need to understand grep, curl or complex scripting. They provide a visual interface for selecting the content elements that you want to capture from a page.
In addition, through Dapper you can generate more traffic and tap into new audiences if you decide to license your content using the “traffic back” license. Then, services that make use of your content will link back to you, generating valuable traffic. In the future, Dapper will allow you to monetize directly on your content.
They’ve done a decent job with the interface for defining which content you want to scrape from a page though I think they can and will do more to make the parsing easier.
Once you’ve configured a Dapper, you can output the resulting data in an array of formats:
- XML – A raw XML feed
- HTML – A simple HTML display of the scraped data
- RSS – A RSS Feed
- Alert – Sends an email alert whenever the data on the page changes.
- Email – Emails the data to any email address
- Google Map – Creates a Google map with any address data from the data source.
- Google Gadget – Creates a gadget to place on your Google homepage
- Image Loop – Creates a scrolling display of all the images in the data feed
- JSON – A JSON datafeed that you can utilize directly in your javascript apps
- Link to Another Dapper – Allows you to use data from one Dapper in another Dapper
To top it all off, they’ve created API’s for PHP4, PHP5 and Java5 allowing you to easily access the data generated from your dapper.
The BILLIONS of pages out there that don’t have an API or RSS feed can now be parsed without a lot of effort.Dapper’s mission is to allow you to use any web based content in any way you can imagine. And by use, we mean going beyond just reading or viewing a webpage. You may want to create an RSS feed or a Google Gadget for a site, take a site’s content and put it on a map, receive an email alert when your site’s Alexa’s ranking goes below 5000, or create a mashup of your favorite band’s tour dates and a camping locations reservation website to organize your musical camping vacation. Whatever you want to do, however you want to mold the web, Dapper can help you do it.
