So, as my last post, I thought I would talk about twitter. As you may know, Twitter is having all of its public tweets archived in the Library of Congress database. I've been confused about this, but luckily, a FAQ was posted yesterday.

What first comes to mind for archiving tweets is, what about all of the bots? They post all the time and are essentially meaningless, unless of course, in the future we are studying early bot behavior.

My second question is answered, in that "linked information such as pictures and websites is not part of the archive, and the Library has no plans to collect the linked sites." I understand why they are doing this, but this will render most tweets meaningless. It's like taking youTube, removing the video and then archiving the comment section.

This is all very strange to me. Yes, I understand that it's an interesting resource for instant news, exemplified by the green party revolt in Iran, but also what about your tweets about what you had for breakfast, or things like that collar that tweets 500 random phrases to your dog's twitter account? On the other hand, if Mez hadn't made her twitter private, she would have all of her poetry enter the archive, which I think would be really beneficial. I guess I can't see into the future. What we study and deem important from this present will probably be our random musings on twitter. Hopefully facebook doesn't decide to donate their database to the library of congress (this would be really creepy), otherwise I'm going to have to start making things private.

Read more . . .

While doing some random surfing on encryption I came across this article on the book Agrippa by William Gibson. I recommend reading the real cool article but here is a short summary.

When Agrippa was first released it came with a floppy disk with one text file. When the text file opened a poem would start. The interesting thing about this text file is that once it was opened and it started it would encrypt itself so that one could not go back and read it again.

Now many years later, through the power of the internet and real cool people you can now watch a video of the poem unfolding. And yes that means someone had this file all these years and never actually looked at it. You can also grab a copy of the file and mess around with it.

So what once was ephemeral is now archived.