I bumped into Andy Cotgreave at Strata London a couple of weeks ago. The Tableau booth had a handy place for me to put my coffee whilst I ate my biscuits, and as a regular user of Tableau and twitter I recognised him immediately! Andy is Social Content Manager at Tableau. I was pleased to see […]
(Machine) Learning about ScraperWiki’s Twitter followers
Machine learning is commonly used these days. Even if you haven’t directly used it personally, you’ve almost certainly encountered it. From checking your credit card purchases to prevent fraudulent transactions, through to sites like Amazon or IMDB telling you what things you might like, it’s a way of making sense of the large amounts of data that are increasingly accessible. Supervised learning […]
Finding contact details from websites
Since August, I’ve been an intern at ScraperWiki. Unfortunately, that time’s shortly coming to an end. Over the past few months, I’ve learnt a huge amount. I’ve been surprised at just how fast-moving things are in a startup and I’ve been involved with several exciting projects. Before the internship ends, I thought it would be a […]
Introducing the Search for Tweets tool
Hey – my name is Ed Cawthorne and I have recently started with ScraperWiki as the resident product manager. My first task is to let you know about the “Search for Tweets” tool on the new ScraperWiki platform. To understand how the Twitter tool came about, it is useful to understand some of the background. […]
The state of Twitter: Mitt Romney and Indonesian Politics
It’s no secret that a lot of people use ScraperWiki to search the Twitter API or download their own timelines. Our “basic_twitter_scraper” is a great starting point for anyone interested in writing code that makes data do stuff across the web. Change a single line, and you instantly get hundreds of tweets that you can […]
Tweeting the drilling
A very long time ago I discovered the easiest webscraping target: the locations of all the North Sea Oil wells. Once you webcrawl through the index pages, the entries were pretty straightforward. There were dates, water depths (in feet or metres), GPS locations and so on. The code, if you want to look at it, […]
Scraped Data Something to Tweet About
I’m a coding pleb, or The Scraper’s Apprentice as I like to call myself. But I realise that’s no excuse, as many of the ScraperWiki users I talk to have not had formal coding lessons themselves. Indeed, some of our founders aren’t formally trained (we have a doctorate in Chemistry here!). I’ve been attempting to […]