Scrapy is a fast high-level screen scraping and web crawling framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.

The positive and negative attitude filters simply find people using the smiling and frowning emoticons; however, it does seem to include several varieties of each emoticon. I would use it as a quick way to find positive or negative mentions, but I wouldn’t use it for any kind of measurement. For example:

RT @drewconway: This looks awesome: Pattern, a Python module for mining web data