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What in the world on the web?Created by Matt Pasiewicz (EDUCAUSE) on September 13, 2008
Ever wonder if any other universities are using jquery or or scriptaculous? Ever wanted to get a feel for how many universities mention blogs or podcasts on their home page? Ever wanted easy access the the home pages of 1,831 universities? I've been working on a pet project and wanted to share what I've worked up this far. Take a peak at the links above, carouse around, and let me know what you think.
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Well, I've added a regular expression search, but the results seem a little off. Seems I have a bit of digging to do.
For instance, consider this REGEXP search
http://www.educause.edu/educause/web_reference/index.php?search_type=REGEXP&q=jquery|mootools
And then compare to these two searches
http://www.educause.edu/educause/web_reference/index.php?q=mootools
http://www.educause.edu/educause/web_reference/index.php?q=jquery
Seems like the two should add up ... apparently I have a little digging to do!
Matt, maybe I missed where you posted this, but I am interested in the specific technique you used to create this search/harvest this data. I think it's probably a pretty small and specific audience who is interested in this kind of thing (e.g. people who manage and build university home pages) but if it's a simple enough process, I can see value for doing this at more localized levels (e.g. provincial or state) - I mean, doesn't everyone like to keep an eye on what the Jones are doing?
Cheers, Scott Leslie
Just created a list of pages to hit, threw their source into a db and then added on a primitive search form and couple of open source js libraries (view the source to check 'em out). I'm hoping to take this a little further and added in extra metadata so that it is easier to filter on different facets of information (state, country, FTE, etc) .... not an especially complex task, but it will require a little time. Bear with me. I'm going to try to invest a little more in it this weekend and then see where that takes me. I'll try to use that as a gauge for next steps .... I'm hoping it'll have some open source/open data flavor. I'm still trying to balance how much to invest in something like this when services like archive.org exists. A slightly different context, I guess. If anyone is interested in chatting at the Annual Conference about it, I'm game.
Hmmm. That's interesting. I initially created this to scratch an itch. Now, I wonder to what extent an archive like this might be interesting for not only designers, marketeers and developers, but also to policy and security wonks. For instance, as an auditing device to see if anything on a page (or series of pages) violates a privacy or security policy. I wonder who else might find data like this interesting and how it might (or might not) need to shape any investment in time.