If you’ve been going through our first ambitious tutorial and taster session for non-coders then good for you! I hope you found it enlightening. For those of you yet to try it, here it is. It is a step-by-step guide so please give it a go and don’t just try and follow the answers as […]
Cupcakes, Conversation (of the business kind) and a Couple of ScraperWikians*
Scraping the web, liberating data, caging ‘The Julian’, it’s a thankless task so here at ScraperWiki we have a reward scheme existing of cupcakes (yes, we are a start up). So where better to have a business lunch with the local newspaper than the local cupcake joint. Read the online article by Alistair Houghton from the Liverpool […]
ScraperWiki Downtime
In order to allow for essential maintenance (our diggers been digging the web for so long it’s in dire need of an MOT!) we’re going to have to take the ScraperWiki website down for a short amount of time on Wednesday (29th June 2011). The site will be down from 13:00 UTC (14:00 BST). We […]
Knight Foundation finance ScraperWiki for journalism
ScraperWiki is the place to work together on data, and it is particularly useful for journalism. We are therefore very pleased to announce that ScraperWiki has won the Knight News Challenge! The Knight Foundation are spending $280,000 over 2 years for us to improve ScraperWiki as a platform for journalists, and to run events to bring together journalists […]
Why the Government scraped itself
We wrote last month about Alphagov, the Cabinet Office’s prototype, more usable, central Government website. It made extensive use of ScraperWiki. The question everyone asks – why was the Government scraping its own sites? Let’s take a look. In total 56 scrapers were used. You can find them tagged “alphagov” on the ScraperWiki website. There are a […]
A reluctant goodbye to Guardian Local
ScraperWiki is sad to hear that Guardian Local is being wound down, just over a year after its public launch. We’ve had the good fortune to work with the talented Guardian Local journalists at three of our Hacks & Hackers events: in Cardiff, Leeds and Glasgow. We would like to say a particular thank you […]
Take a Look at This
Here at ScraperWiki we’re not just about scraping but also about viewing the work you’ve scraped. In this case, ‘The Julian’, didn’t even scrape! He got it from The Guardian Data Blog. They posted an animated history of UK aid 1960-2009 mapped. Spanish design house Bestiaro produced it using OECD aid data. All ‘The Julian’ had to […]
600 Lines of Code, 748 Revisions = A Load of Bubbles
When Channel 4’s Dispatches came across 1,100 pages of PDFs, known as the National Asset Register, they knew they had a problem on their hands. All that data, caged in a pixelated prison. So ScraperWiki let loose ‘The Julian’. What ‘The Stig’ is to Top Gear, ‘The Julian’ is to ScraperWiki. That and our CTO. […]
Read all about it read all about it: “ScraperWiki gets on the Guardian front page…”
A data driven story by investigative journalist James Ball on lobbyist influence in the UK Parliament has made it on to the front page of the Guardian. What is exciting for us is that James Ball’s story is helped and supported by a ScraperWiki script that took data from registers across parliament that is located […]
US visa lottery winners statistics – not just the numbers
The ScraperWiki community has a mish-mash of user interests, so we have a mish-mash of data, scrapers and views. It’s actually quite fun to spend time looking around, to see what people have done and how they have approached a scrape. Samuel Chinweoke Nwaobia found some data on US visa lottery winners (or Green Card […]