Skip to content

Dapper: In Exchange for Traffic Back

Uncategorized

Dapper aims to make it easy to extract and reuse content from any website. They just released Dapper Version 2, providing a good excuse to mention their support for CC licensing which they rolled out in February:

Another exciting part of today’s release is the ability to ascribe licenses to your content allowing you to determine how users can or cannot use your content through the Dapper service. These licenses include several Creative Commons licenses, for those of you familiar with the organization. We’re very happy to be working with the good people at Creative Commons and are sure that together we can do great things. By licensing your content, you can gain significant exposure and traffic for your website as well as empower valuable applications all over the web to use your content legitimately.

An interesting non-technical part of Dapper’s implementation is their description of the licenses supported. CC Attribution is described as “In Exchange for Traffic Back (commercial)” while CC Attribution-NonCommercial is “In Exchange for Traffic Back (non-commercial)”.

Two cool things about this:

1) Dapper did not make up their own ad hoc licenses (which would be uncool and bad for interoperability.

2) They’ve successfully emphasized the key benefit of the CC Attribution license for their target audience — website owners want links and resulting traffic, and attribution required by CC licenses may be in the form of a link — more use means the content owner gets more links and more traffic to their site.

Here’s a screenshot of Dapper’s licensing application:

dapper licensing screenshot

Posted 13 April 2007

Tags