Dapper - screen scraping Web API for any site

Dapper is a service that provides an API to any website (screen scraping for dummies).

Now people will be able to create applications that use the data from any web site easily. Screen scraping is nothing new (I used perl and WWW::Mechanize + regular expressions). You can do cool things like take local movie times, IMDB posters, and RottenTomatoes reviews and mash them all up into a site that will tell you what movies are worth seeing and where they are playing.

Easy screen scraping will push copyright issues to the forefront as new sites are designed showing the contents from others.

One of the first Dapper apps offered is Blotter, a tool to create Technorati rank graphs.

>> Dapper website
>> Dapper screencast demo
>> Report on TechCrunch

This entry was written by engtech, posted on August 18, 2006 at , filed under Technology, Web 2.0 and Social Media. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

2 Comments

  1. Ilya Lichtenstein
    Posted February 02, 2007 at | Permalink

    ZOMG I am so happy I randomly stumbled across this blog post. This is EXACTLY what I was looking for for a web (2.0-ish) application I’m developing. thanks for another useful post!

  2. engtech
    Posted February 02, 2007 at | Permalink

    I never tried it — let me know how it goes.

    And boo/hiss to the Technorati graph starting to show my decline now that my 100+ trackback post from last August is getting past the 6 month mark.

2 Trackbacks

  1. By Hack - Display Your Technorati Rank in a Sidebar RSS Widget (Dapper + Yahoo Pipes) « Internet Duct Tape on July 20, 2007 at

    [...] Technorati rank in their sidebar. Dapper.net and Yahoo Pipes both give the users the ability to create their own mashups of existing web services. Neither of them quite get it right — Dapper doesn’t give you enough output / [...]

  2. By Does Technorati Matter? (Searching for Violent Acres) « Internet Duct Tape on July 20, 2007 at

    [...] Dappr and the Blotter graph for Technorati Ranks [...]