Book Image

Mastering Social Media Mining with Python

By : Marco Bonzanini
Book Image

Mastering Social Media Mining with Python

By: Marco Bonzanini

Overview of this book

Your social media is filled with a wealth of hidden data – unlock it with the power of Python. Transform your understanding of your clients and customers when you use Python to solve the problems of understanding consumer behavior and turning raw data into actionable customer insights. This book will help you acquire and analyze data from leading social media sites. It will show you how to employ scientific Python tools to mine popular social websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and more. Explore the Python libraries used for social media mining, and get the tips, tricks, and insider insight you need to make the most of them. Discover how to develop data mining tools that use a social media API, and how to create your own data analysis projects using Python for clear insight from your social data.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mastering Social Media Mining with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Getting data from blogs and websites


Given the abundance of websites with interesting articles, finding textual data to mine shouldn't be a huge problem. Manually, saving one article at a time obviously doesn't scale up very well, so in this section, we will discuss some opportunities to automate the process of getting data from websites.

Firstly, we will discuss two popular free blogging services, WordPress.com and Blogger, which offer a convenient API to interact with their platform. Secondly, we will introduce the RSS and Atom web standards, used by many blogs and news publishers to broadcast their content in a format that is easy to read for a computer. Finally, we will briefly discuss more possible choices, such as connecting to Wikipedia or using web scraping as a last resort if no other option is available.

Using the WordPress.com API

WordPress.com is a blog and web hosting provider, which is powered by the open source WordPress software. The service provides free blog hosting for registered...