I identified a few things with the feeds that have now been fixed. Dates are properly added to the Democrats feed, the author is now listed at the top of the ALP feed, the Liberals feed has been renamed to reflect that fact that it is the PM media statements being listed.
I have checked the legal note on each site I am scraping from and it all seems ok for the type of purpose I am using it for. The ALP explicitely includes a note allowing this kind of use so no probs there.
And now I am starting to be able to see the benefit from this work. The Democrats comment on the government’s planned fuel excise. The Prime Minister announces the fuel excise. The Democrats respond here and here.
Further, Labor calls for the government to release the Keniry report, then after the release of the report Labor attacks the government, and the Democrats call for banning of live exports. Meanwhile, the government is silent (in fact the only thing the PM seems to want to discuss is Steve Waugh).
There are similar trends around the hunger strikers in Nauru.
What’s cool about all this is that you can see a lot of the dialogue occurring around the issues of the day without worrying about what a journalist has left out – seeing a fuller picture than the mainstream press allows. This to me is the most important benefit of this type of system – even with far from perfect inputs. And hopefully these inputs will improve over time.
Early days, but very interesting…