Media law and ethics » scraperwiki

New event: Digital Media Europe 2013 Hack Day – 13 April 2013

jtownend — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:57:25 +0000

This announcement comes via the excellent Scraperwiki (a start-up I worked with on a series of events in 2010/11). They have teamed up with WAN-IFRA to put on a hack day at Bloomberg on 13 April 2013.

In April, global news media execs are gathering in London, to discuss the continuing emergence of digital media at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe 2013 (#DME13). To help launch and influence the digital-first agenda, ScraperWiki is teaming up with Wan IFRA to put together a hack day on Saturday 13th April.

We are looking for developers, information architects, journalists and data scientists, with have an open agenda covering three key themes:

UK and the EU: In or Out?
How do we tell stories without sticking to print-first assumptions?
Can we make advertising less annoying ?

We’ll start at 9 at Bloomberg’s offices at 39-45 Finsbury Square, EC2A 1HD. The plan is to hack all day, finishing code by 5 for prizes, beer and pizza from 6 onwards.

ScraperWiki will be looking into related datasets to have scraped, cleaned and shiny in advance (if you have any ideas for useful ‘sets, drop us a line), so there will be plenty of info available if you need raw data (and an API).

You can register here.

For more information, you can read more on ScraperWiki’s blog.

Is scraping legal?

jtownend — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 07:46:52 +0000

Reblogged from ScraperWiki Data Blog:

Lots of people, when they hear about ScraperWiki, ask "is scraping legal? how can you build a business off that?". Usually to follow up by saying "we do it in our company, but we would never tell anyone".

This is strange to us, as we have come from a world of good scraping. Taking Government data, and making it easier for people to use for things that benefit all of society.

Open data at the Rebellious Media Conference

jtownend — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:14:50 +0000

On Sunday I participated in a panel discussing Open Data at the Rebellious Media Conference in London. Javier Ruiz Diaz from the Open Rights Group chaired, and Chris Taggart and Martin Keegan talked about their fantastic respective projects, OpenCorporates and OpenSpending.

I put quite a few links in my slides, so here they are, for anyone who is interested. The short presentation covered the ScraperWiki ‘Hacks and Hackers Hack Days’ and a quick overview of some of the problems faced when trying to source and use legal data. Thoughts and comments welcomed!

I also showed a short video from one of the first H&H events in Liverpool.