Sometimes the easiest way of being authentic is to just post an email that was written to be private… Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:29:57 +0000 From: Francis Irving <francis@scraperwiki.com> To: team@scraperwiki.com Subject: Capital! Today we closed our round of investment from Enterprise Ventures and Blue Fountain. In total, provided we hit certain milestones next August, and with […]
The long dark tea time of the computer programmer
The way in which Information Technology is taught in England is so dull and harmful it should be scrapped – that’s the view of the Education Secretary Michael Gove. ‘A nation of digital illiterates’ (BBC) Many years ago there was a total corporate take-over of the computer software sector in the UK. Big money was […]
Our friendly competitors / partners
I made this diagram a few months ago now (for VCs), that shows the world of online data collaboration and scraping from a ScraperWiki point of view. It shows the kind of companies and technologies that, if ScraperWiki were to not exist, people would use instead. Some are there because they do or will need to […]
Which witch is which?
I hope you all had a spooky Halloween and have gorged yourselves on candy. In keeping with the festive cheer, The Guardian Datastore has hopped aboard and with a digger in resident, Chris Blower, and scraped the court cases of Scottish witches. Thanks to Lisa Evans we can now see that the most common reason for a […]
Meet Data Without Borders
Whilst navigating the rugged landscape of ‘Big Data‘, we’ve crossed many barriers, traversed wide plains and battled through choppy weather. Along the journey we’ve picked up a lot of hitchhikers (almost 5,000) and laid down a lot of data tracks (over 75 million records in our data store). We’ve also come across some interesting creatures […]
Scraping New Frontiers
Today is Columbus Day in the US (yes, I’m working regardless). So I’ve decided to write a post about discovery. This has been my first full week in America. I have toiled Heathrow Terminal 5, battled through the baffling New York subway and scaled the mountains of food to find, well, not the promised land. […]
Four data trends to rule them all, the data scientist king to bind them
My favourite soundbite from O’Reilly’s Strata data conference was a definition of big data. John Rauser, Amazon’s main data scientist, said to me that “data is big data when you can’t process it on one machine”. And naturally, small data is data that you can process on one machine. What’s nice about this definition is it […]
Constructing the Open Data Landscape
In an article in today’s Telegraph regarding Francis Maude’s Public Data Corporation, Michael Cross asks: “What makes the state think it can be at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy“. He writes in terms of market and business share, giving the example of the satnav market worth over $100bn a year yet it’s based […]
ScraperWiki goes on the Records at The Texas Tribune
Here at ScraperWiki, we’ve got a good eye for data. Not just structuring, formatting and quality, but also where data can tell stories (hence the addition of views to the site). The decision to put a scraper of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice by Noah Seger on the front page proved to be a bit […]
Open Data Events – Meet like minded folk
Just a quick shout out to upcoming Open Data events crying out for participation from well minded coding citizens like yourselves: Open Australia and ScraperWiki Hackfest: In sunny down under (Sydney) on 10-11 September. No travel bursaries but it is free! Sign up here. It’s a hacking extravaganza for anyone interested in helping liberate data or […]