This is a short Python script to scrape data from Topsy through their API and store it in MongoDB. (Now they require an API key, so some changes are necessary to get it to work.)

topsy-scraper.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
from urllib2 import urlopen, urlencode
from pymongo import connection
import json
from optparse import OptionParser
from time import sleep

verbose = 1

parser = OptionParser()
parser.add_option("-q", "--query", dest="query", type="string", action="store")
parser.add_option("-i", "--interval", dest="interval", type="int", action="store", default=10)
parser.add_option("-u", "--unique", dest="unique", action="store_true", default=False)
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()

params = {'q': options.query, 'type': 'tweet', 'window': 'a', 'perpage': '100'} # http://code.google.com/p/otterapi/wiki/Resources
if options.unique: params['nohidden']='0'
searchurl = "http://otter.topsy.com/search.json?"

c = connection.Connection()
db = c.topsy

def store(otterdata):
    if verbose: print otterdata['content'], otterdata['url'], otterdata['trackback_total']
    db.rawtopsy.save(otterdata)

count = 1

while count <= 10:
    queryurl = searchurl+urlencode(params)+'&page='+str(count)
    if verbose: print "* * * fetching ",queryurl
    data=urlopen(queryurl)
    resp=json.loads(data.read())
    if resp:
        for r in resp['response']['list']:
            store(r)
    count += 1
    sleep(options.interval)