Thursday, April 15, 2010

Library of Congress to Twitter: i♥u. 4evr.

I guess the official announcement went something like this:
"Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow."

It's no "Man Walks on the Moon," but I guess they did the best they could under the circumstances. I mean, it's freakin' Twitter.

According to the LOC blog:
"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."

I guess they decided to do it because Twitter is popular with celebrities and it's an easy way to collect some tiny part of world culture that holds little importance for anyone other than the celebrities themselves.

If you read the story, they mention about 4 important stories that originated on Twitter. And I guess just archiving those four tweets isn't very newsworthy so they bagged them all. Couldn't someone at the LoC just print those 4 tweets out on a sheet of paper and tuck it under the United States Declaration of Independence for safe-keeping?

I hope there's a way to filter out all the people, I mean "celebrities," who signed up for Twitter after the announcement yesterday, 4/14/2010, at around, 11:00 EST, and declare them massively egotistical assholes who want to be remembered along with Oprah and Ashton forever.

What does it mean that the United States of America's Library of Congress has decided to archive all of Twitter? It is a big job? I think I asked once how much space it would take to store all the worlds tweets but I never got a clear answer. I don't know what 50 billion Kilobytes means in storage space. I mean, how big is Twitter? Can the archive fit on a 16GB flash drive? on a 1T hard drive? How much space does it take to store 50 billion 140-character tweets?

And why not archive all internet chat? Why not archive all my posts @ the chat room for ##dELISHUS CHUNKY aSSES!##?

All through 1998, I posted there almost every day, but the Library of Congress doesn't think those chats are valuable. Well, I do because I'm pretty sure a few of those sessions were between me and Marlon Brando. So get off your high horse LoC and archive everything or nothing. Marlon and I... or maybe it was Toby Brando... deserve nothing less.