Downtime for server maintenance

The Dapper website will be down for about 10 minutes tomorrow, April 18, at 2:00pm PDT for maintenance.  Sorry for any inconvenience!

MashupAds: Advertising on a Semantic Web

Recently, Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb and AdaptiveBlue fame, wrote a great and thorough post about the emergence of semantic web technologies in the various facets of web presence, covering core issues (the famous top-down/bottom-up dichotomy) as well as applicative fields such as search and databases.

One field that was sort of left out is the effect of semantic web technologies on the world of online advertising. Given that much of the web is based on advertising, and it’s probably one of the more technology savvy fields, I venture to say it will embrace the semantic web opportunity wholeheartedly.

How would an ad on the semantic web look? Well, we think we have an idea. We call it “MashupAds”:

MashupAds are dynamic display ads that change when your content changes. The ad takes content from a publisher’s site and mashes it up with content from an advertiser’s site, creating an ad relevant to the user’s browsing experience. MashupAds not only bring content into the ad, but they can bring site functionality as well: say you run a travel site, and you have a form for users to input travel dates and a destination. MashupAds let you port this functionality into to your ad, making the ad simply an extension of the site.

Anyone who’s familiar with Dapper can easily understand why we’re uniquely poised to “unlock” advertisers’ and publishers’ content and allow for the building of more engaging, contextual and relevant ads. In fact, a couple of months ago, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Alex’s RWW colleague, wrote a really great story on MashupAds and why it’s good. Check it out for the broader picture.

The main benefit of MashupAds, I believe, will be to the end-user. He will see ads enhancing his browsing experience, rather than obscuring it. He’ll witness an increase in value from the experience, rather than a decrease. Hopefully, he’ll find these new ads compelling.

We’ll be launching the MashupAds platform in private beta next week at Ad:Tech San Francisco (booths 6083-4). We’re happy to have as our launch partners prominent names in the online marketing world such as EyeBlaster and RAMP digital. We’ll be announcing some additional exciting partners and products in the coming weeks, so do stay tuned.

Happy mashing…

ISP Troubles

Dear Dapper users,

Due to some serious problems with our ISP, the Dapper website and service are currently experiencing an outage. We are working quickly to resolve the issue with them. More information as it comes, and our apologies for in the inconvenience.

Update: we are back online.  We are truly sorry for the unannounced disruption of service.  If anyone knows of a reliable, high-performance ISP, we’d love to hear your recommendations as we’re losing patience with our provider.

Semantify Hacks - Creating a your own RDF schema using Dapper

So last Thursday’s release of Semantify was a great success. Marshall Kirkpatrick from RWW  did a great job explaining a rather geeky product in an understandable fashion - thanks Marshall. As we go about semantifying the web, I wanted to point out something that may not be apparent immediately. Basically with Semantify, every Dapp becomes a valid RDF schema that is host on Dapper and can be used anywhere by you, even without Semantify.

Let’s see how using the good old MSN Search Results Dapp. If MSN would’ve deployed Semantify on their search results page (note the irony..), this is what Yaho’s semantic crawler would’ve seen. If you’ll look into the source code of this proxied page, you’ll notice the default RDF schema is defined by the Dapper “dapp-scheme” webservice. While you can choose to override this default schema by defining your own using the $namespace and $scheme variables in the Semantify code snippet, if you don’t, Dapper will use a schema created from your Dapp automatically. So now, building a Dapp means you also built your own RDF compatible schema, that you can use wherever by just pointing to the webservice:

http://www.dapper.net/websiteServices/dapp-scheme.php?dappName=MYDAPP

This may be useful for those people who would like to easily generate and use a schema focused around a particular subject where a wide-spread, all-encompassing standard has not emerged, or in cases where the currently available schemes are not good enough.

Finally, let me leave you with the following thought. Up to now, close to 50K APIs have been built using Dapper with hundreds of new ones every day. That means we have under our hands already some 50K schemes for tens of thousands of sites. Hopefully in the near future we’ll start commenting on what can be learned from this set.

Yahoo: Semantic Web is the ultimate SEO strategy! Dapper: Semantify Your Site

In the last year, Jon and I had the opportunity to present on several occasions our take on the progress and development of the semantic web (next show: Bangalore). During this talk, one of the take home messages we try to convey is that the “limited success” of the semantic web vision has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with economics. Over the last 10 years, Mr. Joe “site owner” has had no incentive to even learn about RDF, let alone go ahead and build his site as semantic web compliant. The most he would be willing to do, and even that is recent, is generate an RSS or two from his home page. Thus, we advocated, semantic web followers should work on generating the incentive, and the rest will follow. Dapper’s success is attributed, to a large extent, to the fact we’re addressing the end-users, who have the incentive to go and make the effort, because they want to build a new RSS/Widget/Mashup etc.

And of course, also attributed to our coding ninjas

Last Thursday (March 13th, 2008), Yahoo’s search team, led by Amit Kumar, presented a strong and clear incentive for web publishers everywhere to jump on the semantic web bandwagon. By announcing that Slurp (Yahoo’s web crawler) will soon start indexing semantic web information, Yahoo effectively transformed the act of making a site “semantic web compliant” into an SEO strategy, taken into account in their crawling, indexing, scoring and presentation of search results.

Now for most publishers and media companies out there, the budget for “pleasing the geeks” is quite small. However, their SEO budget? Well, that’s a totally different story. As Amit rightfully states: “Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats. We believe that app can be web search.” Indeed.

To help site owners make their site semantic web compliant, we’re announcing several tools today. First, we’re announcing the Dapper “Semantify” service - a service that lets you seamlessly create an RDFa version of every page on your site, with virtually zero hassle. When Yahoo’s search engine crawler (or other semantic aware machines) requests a page on a Semantify enabled site, it gets the page augmented inline with the right semantically tagged meta-data. When an end-user requests that page, it gets your usual page. Using the Semantify service, you’ll be able to add meaningful semantics to your site, which in turn will allow Yahoo to better incorporate your content in their search results.

We believe that by removing the technological barrier of re-engineering sites to incorporate semantic information, we will enable a much larger group of publishers to semantify their sites, pushing us further into a world where the semantic web is mainstream.Soon we will also release an RDF transformer that lets you generate an RDF compliant XML as an output of a Dapp. One way in which you can make use of this transformer is by incorporating it as a <link> tag in your pages’ header.

While the road forward is very long, at Dapper we believe that 2008 will be the year where the semantic web will finally have a fighting chance. It is up to us all to make it happen. We hope you will find these new services useful, and we welcome feedback to help us shape their future.

Update: Marshall has written a great blog post about Semantify over at Read/WriteWeb.

Reports on Service Status Move to a New Home

Howdy,

Dapper’s got a new blog: dappertech.wordpress.com.

The new blog is used to update the community on new technical issues, when they arise, and on Dapper’s service status - and that means that the service status reports will no longer be found here.

If these matters are of interest to you, we’d recommend not to read dappertech.wordpress.com as a regular blog (it’s not exactly John Grisham), but rather to subscribe to the Service Status, and to read about new issues when you encounter a problem.

Subscribe to the Service Status feed
View current (unresolved) issues
Check if a certain issue you encountered a while back is resolved

Enjoy Dapping,
Ilan

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Well, you begged and pleaded until finally it was easier to sit down and crank out some code than keep hitting the “Delete” button.

I’m pleased to announce that Dapper now supports drop-down boxes (<SELECT> elements) as input variables. Now when you create a new Dapp and check off “Use as input variable” under a drop-down box, this variable will show up as a drop-down on the Dapp’s “how to use” page. For instance, here’s a Dapp for the Babelfish translation engine:

http://www.dapper.net/dapp-howto-use.php?dappName=babelfishy

This seemingly trivial change has involved a lot of code redesign under the hood that will make it easier to add support for other types of form fields, such as radio boxes and checkboxes, which we’ll introduce in the near future.

Check it out and let us know what you think. We depend heavily on your feedback to determine where to focus our efforts, so please continue to let us know of any problems you encounter or any new features you’d like to see. The squeaky wheel gets the grease!

Peace out,
~Tony

DapperCamp Wrap-Up

Dear Campers and Dapper fans,

DapperCamp was a huge success. People flew in from Boston, Portland, San Diego, Mississippi, and New York to participate in our two day event in San Francisco. The excitement in the air was fantastic and we really appreciate everyone’s help in making the event so great. Here are some photos to give you a taste of DapperCamp.

Presentations from DapperCamp

For your viewing pleasure, all of the presentations given at DapperCamp are online on the DapperCamp wiki, under Presentations.

Partners Speak

Day 2 @ DapperCamp: Presentations of real-life applications of Dapper and how our partners are helping us take our vision further.  Highlights: Dan Gisolfi from IBM and, pictured below, the guys from MindTouch!

Hack Hack Hack!!

DapperCamp update: 2:55PM

Day 1 @ DapperCamp!

Hey Dapper-ites,

We’re underway!  I’m listening to Mitch Kapor give his keynote right now, and hearing such a pioneer talk to us about the origins and development of the web is just invigorating.  I’m sure everyone here is feeling the energy…more updates today as the Camp progresses!

Gone Camping!

DapperCamp is upon us.  Monday morning, Eran, Paul, Ohad, Itai, and I will meet all of you who will be joining us at the Swedish American Hall.  We’re incredibly excited and can’t wait to spend a couple fun-filled days talking about Dapper with you. A lot of people have signed up, so it should be a good crowd. Don’t hesitate to let us know if you need anything and we’re looking forward to meeting you!

Downtime

Due to some unfortunately timed hardware failures, Dapper is currently experiencing intermittent hardware failures. We’re doing everything we can to minimize the downtime and expect things to stabilize soon. Thank you for your patience and apologize for the inconvenience.

Update (1/30/08): after a little bit of calm, we suffered a power outage at our data center.  The machines should be up momentarily and we’re working hard to clear the dust.  We greatly appreciate your patience and are sorry for the inconvenience.

NDF (New Dapper Features)

We’ve recently introduced a couple of cool features we’d like to let you know about. Both have been highly coveted by users and as part of the “Dapper Listens” program, we’ve finally got to them

First, we’ve introduced an updated Dapp search, that allows you to preview live content retrieved from the Dapp, and get an immediate intuition whether this Dapp is good for you or not. It also notifies you if the site this Dapp is based on has changed, allowing you to immediately go and edit the Dapp, so it will be adapted to the current site features. We believe this feature will make searching for Dapps a much more useful and enjoyable experience. Enjoy!

Secondly, we’ve finally introduced a forum system for all things Dapper: forum.dapper.net. In these forums you can share your latest Dapper based hacks, seek support and suggest the next Dapper feature you crave for. Go ahead and let your voice be heard.

These small updates lead the way to an upcoming release to take place within the month dubbed the “Virtual Navigator”. This release will be a major breakthrough and a huge technological milestone for Dapper, where we’ll introduce the ability to work on pretty much any site on the web (flash based sites excluded). We are extremely excited about this release and are looking forward to share it with you. At the moment, this release is being tested in private beta by a group of devoted Dapper users. If you’re interested in testing it, drop us a note, and we’ll add you to group of testers as it grows.

Cheers,

Eran

Deki Wiki Incorporates Support for Dapper

Deki Wiki, pretty much the coolest wiki out there just released version 1.8.3 which incorporates support for Dapper. Effectively, this now means you can bring any content from the web into your wiki! The best way to understand its power is probably to check out Aaron’s screencast demonstrating the new Dapper extension.

The new release is getting lots of great attention all over the web: RWW, Social Glass, Computer World, Mashable, and more.

Thanks to Aaron, Steve, and the Deki Wiki team for bringing such excellent functionality to the open source wiki world.

If you build something cool using Deki Wiki and Dapper, please let us know (and if you’re in the Bay Area, come present it at DapperCamp).

Great Start to a Great Year

So today we’ve started 2008, which we believe will be a great year for Dapper, with bangs and whistles. First Wired Magazine ran a big story on the art and science of scraping, that also mentioned Dapper. Though the reporter tried to show both sides of the penny, it clearly drove home the point that opening up the web’s content can cultivate a great boom of creativity and new apps, something we’ve been advocating from day 1.

Then, good old Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb picked up on the story writing a great review on Dapper as the proponent of the web unlocking paradigm. He even went as far as recording a magnificent screencast on how he uses Dapper to create an RSS feed for del.icio.us RRW mentions. Marshall, thanks for the warm words and the great screencast, this kind of feedback is the greatest fuel in our engines.

BTW, Marshall also encourages you to join us at DapperCamp - Dapper’s first users/developers conference. I’ll join him in the invite - this is going to be two great days in February.

We had a great 2007 and we’re planning an even greater 2008 - brace yourself

Happy Holidays

Way back when in November, the Dapper guys celebrated the first Dapper endorsed mustache day (where a bunch of the guys didn’t shave for a while, only to shave at the same day and have a mustache for 24 hours or so). Such a deed needed to be immortalized for all eternity, and what a better excuse than this holiday season. So here, for your viewing pleasure, the Dapper Quartet: Doron, Doron (yes, we have two), Nir and Uzi, elfing themselves out.

Happy holidays

Come to DapperCamp: Win a MacBook, an iPhone, and more

DapperCamp is about six weeks away and we’re really gearing up. If you haven’t signed up yet, do so quickly as spots are limited. We’re looking forward to meeting all of you and for the opportunity to teach you a bit about Dapper and learn from your experiences.

As if two days of geeking out on Dapper wasn’t enticing enough, today we’re announcing a whole slew of prizes that we’ll be giving away. We’ve got a MacBook, a whole bunch of iPhones, iPod Touches, hard drives, and gift certificates with your name on them. Winning the prizes is easy: just complete one of the bounties we’ve described on the DapperCamp wiki. We’ll be happy to help you in your efforts to complete the bounties. So get started - we hope you’ll have fun working on the projects we’ve described and look forward to giving you some great prizes. Check the wiki for full rules and let us know if you have any questions.

See you at DapperCamp!

Edit: Mashable has kindly posted an article about the contests at DapperCamp.

DapperCamp

You’re invited!  DapperCamp is a free two day conference for developers, partners, Dapper users, and anyone else interested in Dapper.  The conference will take place on February 4 and 5 in downtown San Francisco.  It will include technical tutorials, hack sessions, competitions, prizes, feedback sessions with the Dapper team, and more.  Mitch Kapor will be delivering the keynote address and our partners will be presenting the ways in which they use Dapper (if you’re interested in presenting, please let us know and we’ll get you a slot to present).

Visit the DapperCamp website at dappercamp.com. The website is still under development - you can expect a collaborative workspace to be put up in the coming weeks where you can share Dapper ideas with the team and with fellow attendees.

Attendance is free, but spots are limited so we ask that you register for the event (registration is available at the DapperCamp website).

We’re still fine tuning the schedule, so it may change in the coming weeks.  In the mean time, your input is highly valued so if there is something you’d like to see covered, don’t hesitate to let us know.