Sunday, July 25, 2010

What do you think of all this?

I am honestly reposting this, I have to get up in five hours, so I looked through some of those draft posts, and I found this.  I think it is actually pretty cool and will be the most amazing mine of information for historians, social scientists and artists for years to come.

Reposted:


By Stuart Woods on Quillblog
One of the factors that makes Twitter so addictive is the fleeting, transient nature of the tweet: shortly after appearing online, your 140-character post will be more or less forgotten, consigned to oblivion.
That is about to change, however, with the announcement that Twitter is to become the “official social network of record” now that the U.S. Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, has acquired the entire Twitter archive. According to the LoC blog, the library will archive every tweet ever posted by Twitter’s 105 million users, a tally numbering in the billions. The acquisition will add to the LoC’s already extensive collection of “born digital” materials. From the LoC blog:
[I]f you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000.  Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

hmmm food for thought!

LOVE the water background BTW..V cool
sitting in Kingston w engine trouble..not sure for how long.

Hug

Nomad

The Bodhi Chicklet said...

I have to wonder why anyone would want to preserve tweets. Must be a obsession with homeland security.

J.G. said...

Something's creepy about this . . . but harmless, too? Either way, tweets will not be nearly as interesting on display as Thomas Jeffereson's library.

Boo and Trev said...

Brilliant idea. Scientist, artists and politicians of the day are communicating via blogs,tweets, emails and Web 2 stuff. If you want to have the diaries and the Darwin letters of the future this is what you have to do. The actual academic work will be preserved but it's the ephemera that actually gives you the insights into the scientist or author's minds. Good for the Library of Congress and other institutions that are being so far sighted

Anonymous said...

How many tweets are just about "just pooped its been 3 days lololol" and/or "omgomgomg see this http://bit.ly/aslfjh5aez3f" full of obscure hastags of URL-shortening websites?
Perusing through the archives might prove a bit difficult ;)

oreneta said...

Nomad, I've sat in Kingston cause of engine trouble too.....hope it isn't too long.

Bodhi...then again, lots can be discovered by studying garbage.

jg, no, but they may be fascinating to study.

Boo, with you 100% on that one....

Elp, they would need some kind of search filters, there's no question....