Hackathons have been sprouting up all over the world. In fact, there was an Open Data Hackathon in Guatemala City just last week! But the loudest buzz coming for the data hack hive can be heard in the US where Code for America has been producing the sweetest honey. So here at ScraperWiki headquarters we are […]
There’s More Than One Way to Scrape a Site
A request came in to ScraperWiki to scrape information on the Members of the European Parliament. I put it out on Twitter and Facebook hoping a kind member of the ScraperWiki community will have spent so much time on the computer he/she has no life at all. I had to turn people away! Within minutes, two […]
Access government in a way that makes sense to you? Surely not!
alpha.gov.uk uses Scraperwiki, a cutting edge data-gathering tool, to deliver the results that citizens want. And radically for government, rather than tossing a finished product out onto the web with a team of defenders, this is an experiment in customer engagement. If you’re looking to renew your passport, find out about student loans or how […]
It’s all a matter of trust
According to the latest Ipsos MORI poll on trust in people, only 1 in 5 people think journalists tell the truth. They’re still more trustworthy than politicians generally and government ministers! Phew. But telling the truth and being trustworthy are not the same thing. There’s not believing what they say and then there’s knowing that […]
Meet the User – Brewing up a data storm
By taking part in BigClean we got some very interesting users sharing space with you here on ScraperWiki. It being hosted in Prague meant we got to show off our installation of unicode! So meet (takže sa môžete zoznámiť) Stefan Urbanek. His project, Data Brewery, is a Python framework for data mining. It’s like a coder’s version of […]
Scrape it – Save it – Get it
I imagine I’m talking to a load of developers. Which is odd seeing as I’m not a developer. In fact, I decided to lose my coding virginity by riding the ScraperWiki digger! I’m a journalist interested in data as a beat so all I need to do is scrape. All my programming will be done […]
Meet the User – Robert Brook
Here at ScraperWiki we’re all about making your lives easier (and our lives harder!). We want to help you help yourselves (and in the process make our lives easier!). Part of that means letting you collaborate and share nifty pieces of code to help build and maintain your scrapers. So welcome to the users corner, […]
A Bonny Wee Hack Day at #hhhglas
For our first venture to Scotland where better to be than BBC Scotland! We had 8 teams of hacks and hackers digging around the Scottish data beat. For this very special occasion the ScraperWiki digger has donned tartan! With this special digger, fire incidents, planning applications, public-owned property and gifts councillors’ received have been mined. […]
ScraperWiki-ing Down Under
Streuth! You never know what’s been drilling around on ScraperWiki. If you’ve been too busy hacking away on your own projects you probably haven’t noticed a major undertaking right here on our wiki. Open Australia have made their planning alerts scrapers on the site and we’d like to take this moment to say: “G’day”. PlanningAlerts.org.au […]