There is a great deal of information available on the web that can be used to improve a companies understanding of its competitors & key market trends, provide insights into industry news and key events, and to gauge market reaction to your company’s business practices and policies. With the emergence of blogs as a major force shaping public perception, it is much more difficult to assess shifts in market impressions and competitive threats if you just rely on traditional print and web media sources.

The Data Collection Edition of the Kapow Mashup Server is well suited to the aggregation of web media and blogger post content. It’s really just a matter of writing a few robots that search a list of target websites and blog URL’s that you provide, for keywords, content, or data that you are interested in. Or, you can simply setup a collection of RSS feeds for sites that are the most relevant for your business and monitor activity on a continuous basis. With just a little more work, it’s possible to automate the process of doing a web search on a given topic, clicking on each link returned, and searching for and extracting web content that you’re interested in.

Once you’re collected the targeted information, there are a variety of things you can do with it from within the development environment of the Data Collection Edition:

• Reformat or combine data into a structured data object and write it to a database
• Send content as an RSS feed to an RS reader
• Integrate data or content directly into another application using Java, .NET, development environment or lightweight AJAX, PHP, or Ruby scripting tools.