Robin Good: Here's a new book for journalists interested in learning how to capture information from any web page or resource online, even when who is publishing it has not made that content available for everyone.
The subtitle of the book is: "How to grab data from hundreds of sources, put it in a form you can interrogate - and still hit deadlines"
From the official book site: "Scraping - getting a computer to capture information from online sources - is one of the most powerful techniques for data-savvy journalists who want to get to the story first, or find exclusives that no one else has spotted.
Faster than FOI and more detailed than advanced search techniques, scraping also allows you to grab data that organisations would rather you didn’t have - and put it into a form that allows you to get answers.
Scraping for Journalists introduces you to a range of scraping techniques - from very simple scraping techniques which are no more complicated than a spreadsheet formula, to more complex challenges such as scraping databases or hundreds of documents.
At every stage you'll see results - but you'll also be building towards more ambitious and powerful tools."
Paul Bradshaw runs the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University, and is a Visiting Professor at City University’s School of Journalism in London. He publishes the Online Journalism Blog, and is the founder of investigative journalism website HelpMeInvestigate.
Price: $9.99
Buy the book or find out more: https://leanpub.com/scrapingforjournalists
Via
Robin Good
If you were looking for a way to create a Pinterest-like board, that can integrate web sites, images, video clips and files, and that you can embed within your content, like this, then you should give a good look to LookBooks.
LookBooks is a web service which allows you to curate embeddable visual information boards in which you can organize all content types.
A LookBook looks somewhat like a Pinterest board in which you can manually arrange individual tiles and integrate multiple types of information items, alongside your notes and comments to tell a story or to contextualize the different items presented.
LookBooks can be easily shared, published on the LookBookHQ web site or embedded on any site or blog and can be easily measured in terms of traffic and usage analytics.
Free 30-day trial.
Paid plans (targeted at enterprise customers): $250-2500/mo
My comment: There is a long-standing and growing need for a curation tool, that while extending Pinterest style visual collection abilities provided the ability to manually arrange board items, to include information objects beyond simple images and to be embedded on any web site or blog.
LookBooks fulfills therefore a growing need that Pinterest may not be interested in leveraging yet. Unfortunately LookBooks has chosen a pricing strategy and free-trial strategy (someone has to contact you to get you in) that cuts it out of getting any early traction through early adopters and, as a consequence, I think it may remain a model for other newcomers to exploit more than a useful tool that I can recommend you to take on your toolkit right away.
Interesting nonetheless.
More info: http://lookbookhq.com
LookBook example integrated in an article: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/06/essential-content-templates-checklists/
Other LookBook examples: http://lookbookhq.com/content/#section=example
http://lookbookhq.com/content/gallery/