Dapper.net – Easy to Use Web Content Aggregator

I have always been very impressed with Yahoo! Pipes when it comes to collecting content from multiple sources remix it through RSS/JSON and use it for a number of purposes, which can vary from niche news aggregators, user specific feeds, Amazon applications and much more…

Yahoo! Pipes is fairly straight forward to mash-up information through the web , however to make use of some of its more advanced features requires some programming knowledge in areas such as regular expression parsing.

However there’s a new contender in the content extraction arena which simplyfied things for us. Dapper.net is getting a lot of buzz lately, for all the good reasons. They have created an easy and non-technical content aggregator through a powerful GUI that allows anyone to mash up data from any source without any programming involved.

Content owners have 5 licensing options to distribute their content through Dapper:

1. In Exchange for Traffic Back – It works similarly to the Creative Commons Attribution License, users are required to provide a link back to content owners website.
2. As Public Domain – The content is free for anyone to use for any purpose and allows for the content to be redistributed and sold.
3. According to My Specific Conditions – Includes the same terms as the traffic back license, in addition to any other terms set by the content owner.
4. Explicit Permission Required – User must obtain explicit permission.
5. No Access – Users will not be permitted to use the content under any circumstances.
6. In Exchange for Shared Revenue – coming soon
7. For Pay – coming soon

Dapper features a very powerful way to select several fields off a complex HTML page to create a ‘Dapp’. Before you create your Dapp browse through the extensive library as someone else may have already created a Dapp that suits your needs, or from which you can work upon.

If you can’t find an existing Dapp or if prefer create your own, it only takes a few steps:

You need to first load the URL within Dapper’s GUI, for better results give Dapper a few URLs with similar content. After that, you just need to select which elements you want to parse, group each one into different fields, save your Dapp and set the distribution options. Is that easy!

You can then choose to output your Dapp to a number of formats such as plain XML, RSS, Atom, CSV, HTML, Flash Widget, Netvibes Module, Google Gadget, Google Maps, Facebook Application and many more…

All aspects considered I don’t think that Dapper replaces Yahoo! Pipes or vice-versa. Instead they can in fact complement each other very well making the data extraction process a lot easier and better. In one hand Dapper enables the creation of usable data from any web page through its user friendly interface, on the other hand Yahoo! Pipes offers additional data processing tools which can be used to clean up, filter and sorting of the data collected.

Tino
SEO Programmer