# And the most engaging OUseful.info post is...

This one [Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets](http://blog.ouseful.info/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/)

…

If you want to know how I arrived at this conclusion it’s mostly the same process as [And the most engaging JISC Project is…](https://hawksey.info/blog/2011/08/and-the-most-engaging-jisc-project-is/), but as well as getting social bookmark/share counts I’m also counting the number of post comments (an important part of engagement).

Here’s [a copy of the full spreadsheet with 771 analysed links](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqGkLMU9sHmLdHR1UmJWWndQRHRaMFVENWNzNVItX1E&hl=en_GB#gid=0) (if you make a copy of this you can see the code in Tools > Script editor) and a summary below:

## Counting comments

It actually took two methods. Knowing that WordPress blogs have a comment rss feed for each post I initially grabbed this and snaffled the number of comment items (at the same time I grabbed the post title, as the sitemap.xml doesn’t have this info). Here’s the [code for getting comment counts from comment rss feeds](https://gist.github.com/1155158).

What I forgot was that the comment feed is limited to the number of rss items set in the blog administration, usually 10, so if a post has more these are missed. To solve this I wrote this additional [code which goes through each post with 10 comments and confirms this count by screen scraping the number from the original HTML page](https://gist.github.com/1155170) (its ironic that Tony’s top post is also screen scraping using Google Spreadsheets using an alternative method).

## Bonus – Topsy tweet data

In [my previous post](https://hawksey.info/blog/2011/08/and-the-most-engaging-jisc-project-is/) I mentioned how I used the Topsy service to get a secondary tweet count. As well as the link share count Topsy also keep a record of the tweet which made. This data is also accessible via their [Topsy (Otter) API as part of trackbacks](http://code.google.com/p/otterapi/wiki/Resources?tm=6#/trackbacks). As Tony has done a lot of work with community visualisation ([some posts here](http://blog.ouseful.info/?s=twitter+community)) I thought that as I was querying Topsy I should grab the tweets and dump them in a separate sheet in their JSON format (I should say that unless you start paging the results the maximum you’ll get is 50 tweets).

## Engagement £value£

Something else I mentioned in my [my previous post](https://hawksey.info/blog/2011/08/and-the-most-engaging-jisc-project-is/) was can a monetary value be attached to a Tweet or a Like. In [Sheila MacNeill’s related post I commented that services like PostRank put a suggested value on these forms of engagement](http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/sheilamacneill/2011/08/15/socially-favoured-projects-real-measures-of-engagement/#comment-149191). I’m not convinced that a comment is worth $2.50, there are too many factors like who made the comment, who sees the comment and many others to put a flat rate on it.

For example, using the PostRank formula I calculated that OUseful.info has generated $20,393.25 in ‘engagement’ which I think is a gross underestimate. Considering the number of things I’ve learned and followed up as a direct result of Tony’s work he’s due a sizeable cut from any ‘engagement value’ generated from this site.