JON AIZEN, who previously gave me my Grateful Dead audio archives, has figured out that you could send your personal electronic identity details into PeopleAggregator where you could export it as FOAF or XFN/hCard and then send it back out somewhere else. Alternatively, you could create a "mega-identity account with multiple persona." For Lazyweb trailblazers like Damien Mulley, Dapper is a go-to point when monitoring the behaviour of State agencies, dominant commercial enterprises or new faces online because it enables an RSS feed where none exists. If you write interesting stuff for online audiences and you're precious about your copyright, you should look at what Dapper is doing because its behaviour mimics other scrapers who are currently harvesting your stuff already. Dapper is a clever Web 2.0 application, something that let you leverage disparate web services without negotiating a business deal beforehand. The Irish companies who scrape and repackage like Dapper have clever IP masking that prevents them from being banned by sites who do not appreciate their presence.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, writing in the best space to get info about Web 2.0, explains that "Dapper provides a point and click GUI to extract data from any web site that can then be worked with and displayed via XML, HTML, RSS, email alerts, Google Maps, Google Gadgets, a javascript image loop or JSON. The site could use a UI overhaul to make it easier for nontechnical users and copyright issues will have to be dealt with. That said, Dapper is pretty awesome."
Here is how you could make smart Dapps.
0. Read about the process at Dappit.com. Flash required.
1. Go to a website that interests you because it has good data.
2. View the site through the Dapper virtual browser.
3. Read the tags and links found by the Dapper virtual browser and extract XML feeds.
4. Decide what you want Dapper to do, such as send you an email whenever there’s a story from podcasting.ie on the front page of digg, or when a search results page shows an ENN story with more than 10 diggs.
5. After you set up an end product through Dapper, other users can use the Dapper project either as is, altered to fit their needs or in the future, in combination with other projects.
As a guy who does not browse anymore, getting smart alerts help me immensely. If I can trust Dapper to scrape what I set up, I can map results onto things like Google Maps, generate RSS feeds for sites that don’t publish feeds, or make a slideshow if the data is in the form of images.
Marshall Kirkpatrick -- "Create an API for any site using Dapper"
Marc Canter -- "dapper sounds coolio."
Robert Scoble read about this on his mobile phone.
