*** Note: This software is currently broken (since 2013-11-12), due to recent changes in the
YouTube comment section. If you are
interested in a fixed version, please tell me (see contact at
the bottom of this page). ***
The YouTube Comments And Nicks Collector (or
YouTubeCommentsAndNicksCollector) is a tool to collect
comments and nicknames from YouTube pages and save them to Unicode
UTF-8 encoded plain text
files for further processing, backup, or whatever
your purpose is. There are three different ways to do so:
-
Collect comments only:
If nicknames don't matter or disturb your further usage. The resulting
text file will contain comment after comment, as they appear on the
given YouTube page, separated by three blank lines.
-
Collect comments together with
the corresponding nicknames: The resulting text file will
contain comments and nicknames, as you see them in YouTube, formatted
like <comment><line feed><nickname><3 blank
lines> a.s.o.
-
Collect nicknames only and put
them in a frequency list: If only names matter and to find out
who posted how many comments, the resulting frequency list will contain
every name just once, but with a number in front that tells you how
many posts were written by that user. The list will be ordered
descending by frequency.
General usage:
You can
collect comments and nicknames from any YouTube page, in any language
and save them to plain text files. The files will contain exactly the
same characters, as you can see them in your web browser (assuming that
your web browser and your operating system support the language(s) of
the YouTube comments text, that you want to collect).
If you extract "Comments" or "Comments with Nicknames" you
will get all of them from the web page you entered, even if a comment
is hidden. You will naturally not be able to capture any deleted
comments and belonging nicknames (those remain visible onYouTube) will
be ignored to avoid incomplete pairs of comments and nicknames.
If you extract "Nicknames" you will get all nicknames present on
the entered web page, including nicknames from hidden and deleted
comments.
In order to collect all comments and/or nicknames belonging to a
YouTube media file, click on "All Comments" in YouTube and then
drag or copy the link to the YouTubeCommentsAndNicksCollector. If
there is more than one page of comments, repeat this process
for all pages.
You can save text files containing only the items of a single
YouTube page, but
you can also collect items in the temporary memory to create bigger
collections
and save those later.
Generated plain text files strictly use the Unicode UTF-8 text
encoding ("the multilingual standard").
If you have problems viewing a generated text file (weird or
unexpected characters,...), first make sure that your operating system
supports the character encoding ("the language") of the comments in
that file.
Then you also need an appropriate text editor, that is able to handle
the desired language, i.e. its Unicode UTF-8 characters. Google
provides a lot of information about text editors for most existing
languages and my recommendations can be found in the manual (present in
all download packages) and also in the help notices of the
YouTubeCommentsAndNicksCollector (press the "Help" button).
Screenshots of the user interface
and examples of generated text files:
Examples of usage for the
software:
Prepare text files (e.g. build a corpus) for qualitative and
quantitive text and content
analysis, to process them with other programs like AntConc, ATLAS.ti,
MAXQDA,
or WordSmith (to
find more software related to corpus-based linguistics, have a look at David Lee's CBL links). The YouTube
Comments And Nicks Collector can help
you researching in a variety of scientific fields starting from
linguistics, social sciences and
psychology to politics and economic sciences. As the resulting text
files are quite small compared to the HTML sources, they would also
provide an obvious possibility for private and official
documentation and archives.
Downloads and system requirements:
*** Note: This software is currently broken (since 2013-11-12), due to recent changes in the
YouTube comment section. If you are
interested in a fixed version, please tell me (see contact at
the bottom of this page). ***
The software is distributed under a free and open source license
for non-commercial use. So it is not strictly free and open source as
defined by the Open
Source Initiative and the Free Software
Foundation, but I would call the license as being free and open
source for non-commercial use, as stated before. The software license
is a modified MIT
license, download a copy of it here.
The current stable version is 1.3.2.25, released 2013-01-26.
Download the YouTubeCommentsAndNicksCollector
(303 KB) for Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8. This version
needs the Java 6 Runtime
(or newer) installed. Alternatively you can download a standalone and
portable version
of the YouTubeCommentsAndNicksCollector
(17,1 MB) with an included Java 6 Runtime.
Download the YouTubeCommentsAndNicksCollector
(442 KB) for Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (64-bit Intel only)/ 10.6 / 10.7 /
10.8. Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6
usually has the Java 6 Runtime installed. If not, it is
available under System Preferences > Software Update. Mac OS X 10.7
and 10.8 does not
include the Java 6 Runtime, but if it is needed, a dialog will pop up
and
ask if Java should be downloaded and installed.
Download the YouTubeCommentsAndNicksCollector
(262 KB) for Linux / Unix. The software should run on all operating
systems that have the Java 6 Runtime
(or newer) installed.
Last but not least I would like to state, that I am distributing
the software for free, so that people can benefit from my developments.
In exchange, please consider donating, if the software did a good (read
valuable) job for you.
Contact and Support:
If you have any questions or need support, send a mail to the
address mentioned in the copyright notice at the bottom of this page.
Also, if you have any ideas or special requirements, don't hesitate to
drop me a line.
YouTube Comments And
Nicks
Collector: Copyright (c) 2011 René Herbst (herbst[at]ist.org).
All
rights reserved.
