One of the limitations of using something like Social Mention for buzz research is that that sources you can pull information from is limited. What if you want to get posts from a specialist forum or niche online community? This post is all about pulling information in a structured fashion from any website you want to monitor for buzz.

What are people saying about X-Factor on Facebook?

Say I'm continuing my folly to understand what people think about the X-Factor contestants. I've used some like Social Mention to get a basic understanding of what people are saying about the X-Factor but I want to get at some information from a source not available on Social Mention, for example Facebook wall posts. In order to analyse the wall posts or combine them with other sources, I need to get them into sometype of structured format - and this is where a tool like Dappr comes in. Dappr is a online tool which allows you to pull the content from pretty much any website. Here's a quick overview of how to use Dappr to pull back public Facebook wall posts:

• Go to the Dapp Factory to create a new Dapp - http://www.dapper.net/dapp-factory.jsp
• Pop in the URL of the X-Factor Facebook group - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=4207893737 and click next.
• If we were dealing with something more complex we would look for a number of sample pages, but what we're doing is straightforward so we will just click 'Add to basket' and next.
• Click on the wall posts and they should become highlighted in gold like colour. If Dappr doesn't highlight all of them straightway then click on a few others until they are all highlighted. If Dappr highlights the wrong thing click on the highlighted area to remove it.
• Once Dappr is highlighting all the correct parts of the webpage click 'Save field', give the field a name and click next.
• The preview should show you a list of wall posts. Click next and give your Dapp a name. To save your Dapp you'll need to create a account or login.
• Once your Dapp is saved off you can transform it into a whole range of formats like CSV or RSS, nice.

This is a really simple example, you can do far more advanced things with Dappr. I recommend that you check out the videos on the Dappr site for more information. Capturing one page like this isn't particularly useful by itself, it's far more useful if you create a number of Dapps for different places and combine them with other data sources - the combination of data from several sources is something we can look at in a future post. Remember - When using techniques like this you have to be a bit careful over copyright and licensing. In some instances you cannot not legally pull content from other peoples websites.