Late at night, after a long conversation in a bar (after Social Media Cafe), Zach mentioned one feature that everyone loved about Kasabi. It had an overview page, which automatically summarised each dataset. Of course, Kasabi did it using linked data – telling you how many of your triples were geographic locations, and how many […]
A small matter of programming
We’re rebuilding ScraperWiki. For three years, we’ve been helping people get, clean and analyse data on the web. Our key insight was that you need to write code to do that, and we should make writing that code as easy as possible. Earlier this year, we realised that that isn’t enough. ScraperWiki Classic, as we […]
Job: Turn data into business!
Data has been used for business for centuries. For example, I came across this detailed book of tables made over 500 years ago in India. It’s the revenue in copper coins from the spring and autumn harvests. The book covers many commodities, including sugarcane, indigo, hemp, poppies, cotton, pulses, rice and melons. How they analysed […]
Nurture community! A job at ScraperWiki
ScraperWiki has always been about community. The openness of making data do things, together. Things that matter, that lots of people care about. We’re pleased to announce that we’re hiring a full time Community Manager. If you’re interested in data scientists, in the people who really make this “big data” thing work, coding away in […]
We’re hiring: the world’s best data scientists!
If you’re a ScraperWiki coder with great communication skills and a passion for data, then you should probably bookmark our new Jobs page. We’ll be hiring for a few different roles over the coming months, and we’d love to hear from you! Right now, we’re looking for two Data Scientists to help Dragon Dave get, […]
Hacking the National Health Service
In the age of easy to use consumer software – from Facebook to the iPhone – health workers find the software they get at work increasingly frustrating. Talk to some! You’ll find stories of doctors crossing hospitals to reboot computers to get a vital piece of data. Stories of individuals keeping patient records on Excel […]
Mapping deaths in the Italian prison system.
This is a guest post by Jacopo Ottaviani, Italian freelance journalist and developer. The story it tells was published in the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano. Currently in Italy many prisoners die every month in jail. According to an independent dossier by the Italian non-profit association Ristretti Orizzonti (lit. Narrow Horizons), almost one thousand deaths were registered in the […]
Announcing ScraperWiki Premium Accounts!
The most exciting bit about ScraperWiki is how it forms a link between two very different worlds. On the one hand, we love the public good that data liberation enables, and we’re used by everyone from journalists (did you see us on the Guardian front page last week?) to activists (like the guys behind Australian planning […]
Parsing panic
This is a guest post by Martha Rotter, co-founder of Woop.ie and recently launched Irish technology magazine Idea. Hey remember the Wikipedia blackout? I do, because I was highly amused by the number of students panicking due to papers or homework they seemingly could not complete without this one website. One of my favourite things to […]
Is scraping legal?
Lots of people, when they hear about ScraperWiki, ask “is scraping legal? how can you build a business off that?”. Usually to follow up by saying “we do it in our company, but we would never tell anyone”. This is strange to us, as we have come from a world of good scraping. Taking Government […]