Easy Content Reuse with Dapper

Dapper logoYou may have played with Pipes when it came out – the tool from Yahoo! that provides a workbench for aggregating and manipulating feeds. Web startup Dapper has some of the same flavor, but it makes a bolder claim – “Get any content from the web” – and its step-by-step interface is considerably more accessible. The basic idea behind Dapper is that it can create an XML representation of any web site, given some clues, and then handle a good deal of the transformational drudgery for you without requiring programming.

To use Dapper, you start by showing it the content you want to work with. For a fairly trivial example, this might be an Amazon search. After performing a few different Amazon searches within the Dapper user interface (all within your web browser), you tell Dapper where the information you care about is located. This is done just by clicking on the results pages and typing in field names; Dapper highlights sections of pages and figures out where similar information is located on the various sample pages that you showed it. From there, you can group fields together (so that all of the information on one book, for example, is treated as a unit), and choose an output format: raw XML, RSS, Google Gadget, JSON, YAML, iCal, and other are supported. There’s an API for developers to define more formats as well.

When you’re done, you can store the whole thing as a “Dapp” that anyone can access, and choose a license for it as well. They promise to allow some monetization options for content redistribution in the future, though those are not in place yet. You can search existing public Dapps, and aggregate or link them together, giving the tool some of the features of Pipes without having quite the full-blown transformational power that you’ll find in Pipes (unless you want to grub around in the Dapper API).

On the plus side, Dapper provides a quick and easy way to get pretty much any content (as long as the site conforms to reasonably modern web markup principles) into popular formats; even if you know nothing about RSS or Google Gadgets, you can get it to spit one out easily. On the potential minus side, you need to remember that everything here goes through Dapper’s own servers; the end result will come through a Dapper URL, and so you’re depending on them to stay up and running. So explore and experiment, but do your diligence before you use Dapper for anything mission-critical.

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