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

[Peter Ryan]

Dear all,

I'm contacting the list now with a few quick questions concerning blog tracking and Facebook tracking techniques, and if you have time to respond it would be greatly appreciated. ???

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 Canadian candidates we'll be tracking during this election are: Stephen Harper, Stéphane Dion, Jack Layton, Elizabeth May, and Gilles Duceppe.  We also plan to track their respective political parties via tags and blog rolls; the parties are as follows: the Conservative Party, Liberal Party, New Democrat Party, Green Party, and the Bloc Quebecois.?? Any ideas, platforms, or scripts to do this sort of blog tracking for candidates would be fantastic.    We’re hoping to compile a number of innovative options.


???2) TechPresident.com Facebook Charts: http://www.techpresident.com/scrape_plot/facebook??

We're also trying to figure out how Tech President creates its beautiful Facebook candidate supporter charts (at the url above).  We'd be interested in setting up something similar here for tracking our Prime Minister Candidates as above, and we’re looking for some quick and easy solutions.  Any ideas or tips on how we could do this ourselves?  Or what are other people doing in terms of this type of research?  Again, we’re hoping to compile a number of innovative options which we’ll share with the list.

Thank you all for your time and consideration of this message.??

Sincerely,

Peter

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Peter Malachy Ryan, PhD Candidate

Rogers Fellow, Communication and Culture Programme
Instructor, Department of Politics and Public Administration
Research Associate, Infoscape Lab: www.infoscapelab.ca
Ryerson University