[Air-L] choice of crawler?

[Anders Koed Madsen]

Dear AoiR´s

I am currently about to embark on a longitudinal hyperlink-analysis in
which the aim is to follow the links from 20 seed URLs over a
time-span of one year. My plan is to do some quantitative analysis on
the networks and I have conducted a pilot-study using Issue-crawler
(http://www.issuecrawler.net/) in combination with UCInet
(http://www.analytictech.com/ucinet/).

Before making a final decision on which crawler to use I just wanted
to know whether anyone of you have opinions about the the
Issue-crawler in comparison to SoSciBot (http://socscibot.wlv.ac.uk/)
and VOSON (http://voson.anu.edu.au/) or other crawlers. So:

-	What are the pro and cons of the different software-packages?
-	Does any of them allow for detecting the timestamp of the link (when
is it placed)? Or do you know of any crawlers that do that?
-	Can the results of SoSciBot and VOSON be exported into UCI-net as
well (I haven´t been able to figure that out from the sites)?

All the best,

Anders Koed Madsen