Locking in user created data
There is a unfortunate trend among sites, that centres around user created/collected data, to bee very protective about there database. To the degree that they prevent, or at least don’t help, the users to use there data in other contexts.
The latest one I heard user grumble about is BeerAdvocate, a beer community site that centres around user committed beer reviews. As a user commits more reviews a lot of use full statistics become available, for example it is a well established fact that we humans don’t really know what we want, if asked about right. So it is perfectly feasible that one think that one style of beer is ones favourite, but one keeps giving a other style better reviews.
As fellow Swedish beer geek bark noted, there is unfortunately no easy way to export the raw data one has putt in to there system. The problem bark was trying to solve was the simple question, have I had this beer before, if so was it any good. As BA provides a nice tables with all reviews of a user, it was a simple matter of parsing the tables in to more useful formats.
30 minutes later I now have a BA review list exporter, now what? Oh well at least it was time more well spent than watching the tube.
And if any one whant a cvs (or what not) with there reviews, just drop me a line.
Tags: data export, programming