If you're interested in web scraping, take a look at Mechanize (it's available for Perl, Python, and Ruby, at least, though I prefer Ruby) - it makes web scraping trivial.
Im not interested in web scraping per se but in my previous gig, I was doing erm some 'marketing' through social networks and I was frustrated at not being able to contribute more actively to the process. The marketing work was essentially a programmers job.
So its nice to be able to look under the hood now and see whats going on!