Where to Find Quick Start and Blog Resources on Mining the Social Web

Updated

Mining the Social Web (miningthesocialweb.com) organizes its core resources into three navigation links: Blog, Quick Start, and About. If you want to start learning the material, go to Quick Start; if you want to see worked examples and updates, go to the Blog. The About page explains the background of the site and the book behind it.

Site Navigation at a Glance

Section What it is for When to use it
Quick Start Entry point for getting started with the site's material You are new and want a guided starting point
Blog Posts on specific data mining tasks and roundups You want concrete examples or updates
About Background on the site and the book project You want context on who runs it and why

What the Blog Covers

The blog is where the site's practical, task-level content lives. Visible post topics include:

  • "How To Mine Your GMail with Google Takeout and MongoDB" — a walkthrough of exporting Gmail data and loading it into MongoDB for analysis.
  • "Twitter Data Mining Round Up" — a collected set of Twitter data mining resources.
  • "Rebooting Mining the Social Web for a Rapidly Changing World" — a January 27, 2019 post explaining the overhaul behind the third edition.

That last post is the most useful for understanding the site's direction. It describes how the third edition came together, including the addition of co-author Mikhail Klassen, and why the project changed course.

Why the Content Shifted

The "Rebooting" post explains a constraint that shapes everything on the site: technology moves faster than the publishing cycle. The original plan for the third edition was mainly to modernize code to Python 3 and verify it still ran. That plan changed after 2016.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and major data breaches, social media platforms came under heavier scrutiny and went on the defensive. According to the post, APIs were changed, access to data was severely curtailed, and certain privileges began requiring approval from platform developers. Because the book was full of examples built on that data access, a lot of the code no longer worked as written.

This matters if you are following older tutorials: expect that some platform-specific examples may need adjustment, and check the blog for the site's own updates rather than assuming older code still runs unchanged.

A Practical Way to Use the Site

  1. Start with Quick Start to get oriented.
  2. Read the "Rebooting" blog post to understand what changed and why.
  3. Pick a task-specific post, such as the Gmail/Google Takeout/MongoDB walkthrough, if it matches what you want to do.
  4. Check About for background on the book and authors.

The site does not publish pricing or login details in the material available here, so treat access terms as something to confirm on the site itself.