Dear Anders, To echo Robert Ackland's reply: It's not possible to identify the creation date of a link from the page containing the link. The only possibility to estimate this is to look at old copies of the page in the Internet Archive (or another archive) and work out when the link first appeared. You probably wouldn't want to do this for many links if you want to finish your research :) SocSciBot can export link networks to UCINET via Pajek, like VOSON. SocSciBot doesn't have anything specific for comparing results over time so this would be a manual process. Best wishes, Mike Thelwall

Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:05:41 +0100 From: Anders Koed Madsen <anderskoedmadsen@gmail.com> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] choice of crawler? Message-ID: <AANLkTinzhz=jFAR0y=Ew0Sx0DskL0u1Ywt3OC7M28Hab@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Dear AoiR?s

I am currently about to embark on a longitudinal hyperlink-analysis in which the aim is to follow the links from 20 seed URLs over a time-span of one year. My plan is to do some quantitative analysis on the networks and I have conducted a pilot-study using Issue-crawler (http://www.issuecrawler.net/) in combination with UCInet (http://www.analytictech.com/ucinet/).

Before making a final decision on which crawler to use I just wanted to know whether anyone of you have opinions about the the Issue-crawler in comparison to SoSciBot (http://socscibot.wlv.ac.uk/) and VOSON (http://voson.anu.edu.au/) or other crawlers. So:

- What are the pro and cons of the different software-packages? - Does any of them allow for detecting the timestamp of the link (when is it placed)? Or do you know of any crawlers that do that? - Can the results of SoSciBot and VOSON be exported into UCI-net as well (I haven?t been able to figure that out from the sites)?

All the best,

Anders Koed Madsen