[Air-L] Blog Archiving Technology Query / Facebook Tracking

[elw at stderr.org]

> 1) Blog Archiving Platforms:??
>
> We're currently getting ready for another Canadian federal election, 
> which we're hoping to track electronically at the Infoscape Lab here in 
> Toronto: www.infoscapelab.ca.  We're trying to find a good blog archiver 
> that imports/exports complete RSS files with full text entries into a 
> database format that's easily interoperable with MSAccess or Excel (and 
> can be automated).  For example, RSS Owl allows people to export single 
> entries into XML, but not aggregated entries for all blogs that mention 
> a candidate like "Stephen Harper" with full text (as far as we know...).

The most difficult question here is, "where are you going to get a list of 
all blogs mentioning X from?", rather than the technology.  Sometimes the 
hard part really IS the human element :-)

If you can produce a list of rss feeds, grabbing them periodically and 
injecting them into a database is quite straightforward... the tools in 
that space are pretty sound.  [And I'd be happy to dump snips of code at 
you to do it...]

--elijah