What Open Source projects are similar? It seems like data transformation tasks like this are a universal problem. I'd just do map/reduce, but that's the advantage that comes with being a developer. Great tools for non-developers to do limited programming tasks are incredibly useful.
Check out Diffbot @ http://www.diffbot.com/ -- you can setup repeat crawls and extract data into .csv/Excel file format or JSON with Crawlbot API, extract data automatically with automatic APIs, or Custom API Toolkit. You can get a free trial account at https://www.diffbot.com/plans/trial to try it out, and you can get paid plans at http://www.diffbot.com/pricing/.
I've seen something similar more than once on HN but my google-fu is failing. What other similar services are out there that'll let you smartly scrape a page into a spreadsheet.
In the past, I've tried Google spreadsheets with "ImportXML" option but got frustrated after a bit and resorted to python.
I love these tools but before I invest more of my time leveraging this in my workflow I'd want to know that it'll be around for another few months at least...
