We know that lots of you use data from our astonishingly simple Twitter tools in visualisation tools like Tableau. While you can download your data as a spreadsheet, getting it into Tableau is a fiddly business (especially where date formatting is concerned). And when the data updates, you’d have to do the whole thing over […]
ScraperWiki Classic retirement guide
In July last year, we announced some exciting changes to the ScraperWiki platform, and our plans to retire ScraperWiki Classic later in the year. That time has now come. If you’re a ScraperWiki Classic user, here’s what will be changing, and what it means for you: Today, we’re adding a button to all ScraperWiki Classic […]
New ScraperWiki tool lets you extract data from reports with complete accuracy
It’s not always possible to automate data gathering, even with scrapers. Often we find customers want to regularly update data in ScraperWiki via spreadsheets. Either they’ve made the spreadsheets via a report from another system (typically one that isn’t on the web), or they gather the data by hand (for example, by phoning someone up […]
Sharing in 6 dimensions
Hands up everyone who’s ever used Google Docs. Okay, hands down. Have you ever noticed how many different ways there are to ‘share’ a document with someone else? We have. We use Google Docs at lot internally to store and edit company documents. And we’ve always been baffled by how many steps there are to […]
Open your data with ScraperWiki
Open data activists, start your engines. Following on from last week’s announcement about publishing open data from ScraperWiki, we’re now excited to unveil the first iteration of the “Open your data” tool, for publishing ScraperWiki datasets to any open data catalogue powered by the OKFN’s CKAN technology. Try it out on your own datasets. You’ll […]
Your questions about the new ScraperWiki answered
You may have noticed we launched a completely new version of ScraperWiki last week. Here’s a suitably meta screengrab of last week’s #scraperwiki twitter activity, collected by the new “Search for tweets” tool and visualised by the “Summarise this data” tool, both running on our new platform. These changes have been a long time coming, […]
Data analysis using the Query with SQL tool
Ferdinand Magellan, the Renaissance’s most prodigious explorer. He almost certainly knew lingua franca – but did he know SQL?It’s Summer 1513. Rome is the centre of the Renaissance world, and Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese merchant ships criss-cross the oceans, ferrying textiles from the North, spices from the East, and precious metals from the newly-discovered Americas. […]
Announcing the new ScraperWiki.com
Today is a big day for ScraperWiki – Our new platform is coming out of beta. Sign up and give it a go! We think you’ll like it. ScraperWiki is about liberating data from silos and empowering you to do what you want with it. You can either write your own code, or use our […]
It’s all about tools
The new ScraperWiki is all about tools. People talk a lot about data, big data, data mining, data science. But the action happens in tools. Tools like Excel, R, SPSS, Python. Or, on the new ScraperWiki, tools like View in a table, Summarise this data and Query with SQL. We’ve just pushed an improvement to […]
Programmers past, present and future
As a UX designer and part-time anthropologist, working at ScraperWiki is an awesome opportunity to meet the whole gamut of hackers, programmers and data geeks. Inside of ScraperWiki itself, I’m surrounded by guys who started programming almost before they could walk. But right at the other end, there are sales and support staff who only […]