Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:

• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection

Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:

• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.

Should you have any queries regarding Web Data extraction services, please feel free to contact us. We would strive to answer each of your queries in detail.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services-and-Data-Collection-Form-Website-Pages&id=4860417

Scraping bids out for SS United States

Yesterday we posted that the Independence Seaport Museum doesn’t have the money to support the upkeep of the USS Olympia nor does it have the money to dredge the channel to tow her away.  On the other side of the river the USS New Jersey Battleship Museum is also having financial troubles. Given the current troubles centered around the Delaware River it almost seems a shame to report that the SS United States, which has been sitting of at Pier 84 in South Philadelphia for the last fourteen years,  is now being inspected by scrap dealers.  Then again, she is a rusting, gutted shell.  Perhaps it is time to let the old lady go.    As reported in Maritime Matters:

SS UNITED STATES For Scrap?

An urgent message was sent out today to the SS United States Conservancy alerting members that the fabled liner, currently laid up at Philadelphia, is being inspected by scrap merchants.

“Dear SS United States Conservancy Members and Supporters:

The SS United States Conservancy has learned that America’s national flagship, the SS United States, may soon be destroyed. The ship’s current owners, Genting Hong Kong (formerly Star Cruises Limited), through its subsidiary, Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), are currently collecting bids from scrappers.

The ship’s current owners listed the vessel for sale in February, 2009. While NCL graciously offered the Conservancy first right of refusal on the vessel’s sale, the Conservancy has not been in a financial position to purchase the ship outright. However, the Conservancy has been working diligently to lay the groundwork for a public-private partnership to save and sustain the ship for generations to come.

Source:http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2010/03/scraping-bids-out-for-ss-united-states/

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 on ScraperWiki, as such this is the only coding home I know. So if you’re new to ScraperWiki and want to make the site a scraping home-away-from-home, here are the basics for scraping, saving and downloading your data:

With these three simple steps you can take advantage of what ScraperWiki has to offer – writing, running and debugging code in an easy to use editor; collaborative coding with chat and user viewing functions; a dashboard with all your scrapers in one place; examples, cheat sheets and documentation; a huge range of libraries at your disposal; a datastore with API callback; and email alerts to let you know when your scrapers break.

So give it a go and let us know what you think!

Source:https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2011/04/scrape-it-save-it-get-it/

Ethics in data journalism: mass data gathering – scraping, FOI and deception

Mass data gathering – scraping, FOI, deception and harm

The data journalism practice of ‘scraping’ – getting a computer to capture information from online sources – raises some ethical issues around deception and minimisation of harm. Some scrapers, for example, ‘pretend’ to be a particular web browser, or pace their scraping activity more slowly to avoid detection. But the deception is practised on another computer, not a human – so is it deception at all? And if the ‘victim’ is a computer, is there harm?

The tension here is between the ethics of virtue (“I do not deceive”) and teleological ethics (good or bad impact of actions). A scraper might include a small element of deception, but the act of scraping (as distinct from publishing the resulting information) harms no human. Most journalists can live with that.

The exception is where a scraper makes such excessive demands on a site that it impairs that site’s performance (because it is repetitively requesting so many pages in a small space of time). This not only negatively impacts on the experience of users of the site, but consequently the site’s publishers too (in many cases sites will block sources of heavy demand, breaking the scraper anyway).

Although the harm may be justified against a wider ‘public good’, it is unnecessary: a well designed scraper should not make such excessive demands, nor should it draw attention to itself by doing so. The person writing such a scraper should ensure that it does not run more often than is necessary, or that it runs more slowly to spread the demands on the site being scraped. Notably in this regard, ProPublica’s scraping project Upton “helps you be a good citizen [by avoiding] hitting the site you’re scraping with requests that are unnecessary because you’ve already downloaded a certain page” (Merrill, 2013).

Attempts to minimise that load can itself generate ethical concerns. The creator of seminal data journalism projects chicagocrime.org and Everyblock, Adrian Holovaty, addresses some of these in his series on ‘Sane data updates’ and urges being upfront about

    “which parts of the data might be out of date, how often it’s updated, which bits of the data are updated … and any other peculiarities about your process … Any application that repurposes data from another source has an obligation to explain how it gets the data … The more transparent you are about it, the better.” (Holovaty, 2013)

Publishing scraped data in full does raise legal issues around the copyright and database rights surrounding that information. The journalist should decide whether the story can be told accurately without publishing the full data.

Issues raised by scraping can also be applied to analogous methods using simple email technology, such as the mass-generation of Freedom of Information requests. Sending the same FOI request to dozens or hundreds of authorities results in a significant pressure on, and cost to, public authorities, so the public interest of the question must justify that, rather than its value as a story alone. Journalists must also check the information is not accessible through other means before embarking on a mass-email.

Source: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2013/09/18/ethics-in-data-journalism-mass-data-gathering-scraping-foi-and-deception/

The Hubcast #4: A Guide to Boston, Scraping Local Leads, & Designers.Hubspot.com

The Hubcast Podcast Episode 004

Welcome back to The Hubcast folks! As mentioned last week, this will be a weekly podcast all about HubSpot news, tips, and tricks. Please also note the extensive show notes below including some new HubSpot video tutorials created by George Thomas.

Show Notes:

Inbound 2014

THE INSIDER’S GUIDE TO BOSTON

Boston Guide

On September 15-18, the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center will be filled with sales and marketing professionals for INBOUND 2014. Whether this will be your first time visiting Boston, you’ve visited Boston in the past, or you’ve lived in the city for years, The Insider’s Guide to Boston is your go-to guide for enjoying everything the city has to offer. Click on a persona below to get started.

Are you the The Brewmaster – The Workaholic – The Chillaxer?

Check out the guide here

HubSpot Tips & Tricks

Prospects Tool – Scrape Local Leads
Prospects Tool

This weeks tip / trick is how to silence some of the noise in your prospect tool. Sometimes you might have need to just look at local leads for calls or drop offs. We show you how to do that and much more with the HubSpot Prospects Tool.

Watch the tutorial here

HubSpot Strategy
Crack down on your sites copy.

We talk about how your home page and about pages are talking to your potential customers in all the wrong ways. Are you the me, me, me person at the digital party? Or are you letting people know how their problems can be solved by your products or services.

HubSpot Updates
(Each week on the Hubcast, George and Marcus will be looking at HubSpot’s newest updates to their software. And in this particular episode, we’ll be discussing 2 of their newest updates)
Default Contact Properties

You can now choose a default option on contact properties that sets a default value for that property that can be applied across your entire contacts database. When creating or editing a new contact property in Contacts Settings, you’ll see a new default option next to the labels on properties with field types “Dropdown,” “Radio Select” and “Single On/Off Checkbox”.

Default Contact Properties
When you set a contact property as “default”, all contacts who don’t have any value set for this property will adopt the default value you’ve selected. In the example above, we’re creating a property to track whether your contact uses a new feature. Initially, all of them would be “No,” and that’s the default property that will be applied database-wide. As a result, this’ll get stamped on each contact record the value wasn’t present on.

Now, when you want to apply a contact property across multiple contacts, you don’t have to create a list of those contacts and then create a workflow that stamps that contact property across those contacts. This new feature allows you to bypass those steps by using the “default” option on new contact properties you create.

Watch the tutorial here
RSS Module with Images

Now available is a new option within modules in the template builder that will allow you to easily add a featured image to an RSS module. This module will show a blog post’s featured image next to the feed of recent blog content. If you are a marketer, all you need to do is simply check the “Featured Image” box off in the RSS Listing module to display a list of recent COS blog posts with images on any page. No developers or code necessary to do this!

If you are a designer and want to add additional styling to an RSS module with images, you can do so using HubL tokens.

Here is documentation on how to get started.

Default Contact Properties
Watch the tutorial here

HubSpot Wishlist

 The HubSpot Keywords Tool

Why oh why!!!! Hubspot why can we only have 1,000 keywords in our keywords tool? We talk about how for many companies a 1,000 keywords dont just cut it. For example Yale applaince can easily blow through those keywords.

Source: http://www.thesaleslion.com/hubcast-podcast-004/

Web Scraping’s 2013 Review – part 2

As promised we came back with the second part of this year’s web scraping review. Today we will focus not only on events of 2013 that regarded web scraping but also Big data and what this year meant for this concept.

First of all, we could not talked about the conferences in which data mining was involved without talking about TED conferences. This year the speakers focused on the power of data analysis to help medicine and to prevent possible crises in third world countries. Regarding data mining, everyone agreed that this is one of the best ways to obtain virtual data.

Also a study by MeriTalk  a government IT networking group, ordered by NetApp showed this year that companies are not prepared to receive the informational revolution. The survey found that state and local IT pros are struggling to keep up with data demands. Just 59% of state and local agencies are analyzing the data they collect and less than half are using it to make strategic decisions. State and local agencies estimate that they have just 46% of the data storage and access, 42% of the computing power, and 35% of the personnel they need to successfully leverage large data sets.

Some economists argue that it is often difficult to estimate the true value of new technologies, and that Big Data may already be delivering benefits that are uncounted in official economic statistics. Cat videos and television programs on Hulu, for example, produce pleasure for Web surfers — so shouldn’t economists find a way to value such intangible activity, whether or not it moves the needle of the gross domestic product?

We will end this article with some numbers about the sumptuous growth of data available on the internet.  There were 30 billion gigabytes of video, e-mails, Web transactions and business-to-business analytics in 2005. The total is expected to reach more than 20 times that figure in 2013, with off-the-charts increases to follow in the years ahead, according to researches conducted by Cisco, so as you can see we have good premises to believe that 2014 will be at least as good as 2013.

Source:http://thewebminer.com/blog/2013/12/

Web Scraping’s 2013 Review – part 2

As promised we came back with the second part of this year’s web scraping review. Today we will focus not only on events of 2013 that regarded web scraping but also Big data and what this year meant for this concept.

First of all, we could not talked about the conferences in which data mining was involved without talking about TED conferences. This year the speakers focused on the power of data analysis to help medicine and to prevent possible crises in third world countries. Regarding data mining, everyone agreed that this is one of the best ways to obtain virtual data.

Also a study by MeriTalk  a government IT networking group, ordered by NetApp showed this year that companies are not prepared to receive the informational revolution. The survey found that state and local IT pros are struggling to keep up with data demands. Just 59% of state and local agencies are analyzing the data they collect and less than half are using it to make strategic decisions. State and local agencies estimate that they have just 46% of the data storage and access, 42% of the computing power, and 35% of the personnel they need to successfully leverage large data sets.

Some economists argue that it is often difficult to estimate the true value of new technologies, and that Big Data may already be delivering benefits that are uncounted in official economic statistics. Cat videos and television programs on Hulu, for example, produce pleasure for Web surfers — so shouldn’t economists find a way to value such intangible activity, whether or not it moves the needle of the gross domestic product?

We will end this article with some numbers about the sumptuous growth of data available on the internet.  There were 30 billion gigabytes of video, e-mails, Web transactions and business-to-business analytics in 2005. The total is expected to reach more than 20 times that figure in 2013, with off-the-charts increases to follow in the years ahead, according to researches conducted by Cisco, so as you can see we have good premises to believe that 2014 will be at least as good as 2013.

Source:http://thewebminer.com/blog/2013/12/