Kapow Robots

Friday, August 8, 2008

RSS RobotThis robot creates an Atom or RSS feed, outputs data in Atom 1.0 and RSS 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0 formats. You can set the format in the RoboMaker or through the “rssVersion” parameter when you invoke the robot. Also, you choose the schedule for the RSS robot before you publish it, i.e run every 30 minutes, 12 hours, or every day.

Example:
http://service.openkapow.com/Cai/iph.rss
http://service.openkapow.com/Cai/iph…rsion=atom_1.0

Recommendation:  Creating a basic RSS robot that reads from Digg

REST Robot
This robot run as a REST service, called using normal URL, takes in input values as parameters and outputs data as XML, JSON, CSV, HTML or XHTML. You can set the format in the RoboMaker or through the “resultformat” parameter when you invoke the robot. You can define a default format in the RoboMaker ( File->Robot Configuration->Output formats ). If the “resultformat” parameter is not specified, the default format is used.

Example:
http://service.openkapow.com/tutoria…archText=kapow
http://service.openkapow.com/tutoria…sultformat=xml

Recommendation: Creating a basic REST robot that searches Google

Web Clip Robot
This robot is a reuse of one site’s UI, taking complete site or just part of it, outputs pure HTML. You can tweak the site’s html and stylesheets in the RoboMaker. This is useful in taking one fucntionality from a site to display it to another. It realizes the potential of making the web your personal database.

Recommendation: Creating a basic Web Clip robot that clips Wired News

OpenKapow

Monday, August 4, 2008

What is OpenKapow?

Using the kapow web-crawling bot technology, you can create your own REST and RSS easily and quickly, pulling out internet information from any websites ( which of course have not yet banned Kapow ) for other use, may it be personal or for profit. OpenKapow is more of a web scrapper than a mashup maker but REST services, RSS feeds and web clips that can be produced using it is enough to be backbone of all kinds of mashups. Good thing about OpenKapow is it’s free. There are also proprietary products from Kapow Technologies ( if you’re really interested about it ), of course these guys need to make bucks too. (more…)