I was looking around for some web data scraping software and came across Mozenda.com, which is a [paid] Web Scraper and web data mining software that parses web data in a variety of formats, like CSV, RSS, and XML.  I signed up for the trial and the software really did do what it claimed to, and was really easy to use.  The guy that heads the service offers a cool demo here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKrdFiilqXM

Only real downside is the pricing…most code gurus can probably come up with a more basic yet less costly way of doing the same thing.  Pricing starts at $49.95/mo and goes up to $1995/mo, but also has an option to pay as you go.  For  a business this would probably be petty cash and worth the expense, but for the average blogger like me, it’s a little out of the price range.  However, I probably could never code an application or service as feature-rich as the product that Mozenda provides which is why I was considering them.

For those of you wondering WTF I’m talking about, data mining is simply the process of collecting and organizing data, in my case, from other websites.  When you have a handful of 100+ sites, it’s more efficient to have a bot do it for you, kind of like what search engines use to index millions of sites on the Internet.