Here's another toughie. What material on the internet should be preserved?

I think it’s tilting at windmills. There are just too much data. They’ll get tired of that project, and as far as I know, nothing dies on the Net anyway. It all seems to be self-preserving. I can find remarks I made on ECHO in 1994.

My impresssion is also that it seems like a waste of money and resources but obviously there is some scholarly rationale for the concept.

They are archiving twitter. I think it’s a weird choice.

Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

Craigslist I can see. Newspaper classifieds are a great historical reference, and CL has almost replaced those.

Yeah – the value of preserving tweets seems like searching for “diamonds in the dustheap.”

Ridiculous

Much of this “content” is obsolete within hours or days. Much more selectivity is warranted.
Fluther content is of more lasting value and still they must be even more worthy candidates for archiving.

Why bother? The tweets and whatnot are being archived in all kinds of places in the cloud already. Does the LOC need it’s own set of servers and storage space to keep a copy of all this? How many backups will they have?

Will the archive make it easier for anyone to access any of this stuff? Will they catalog it? What metadata standard will they use? Have they invented something new just for tweets?

The only useful contribution this archive might make that I can think of is cataloging all the tweets. But that is an enormous task all by itself. I suppose it has to be done by program, but the metadata will probably be a larger database than the original material. The librarians will have to figure out what it is about tweets that researchers might find useful.

Well, it’s not just Twitter but all internet data. I don’t what the indices would be; if any.

I don’t think the Library of Congress should concern itself with fleeting tweets.

@marinelife Properly cataloged, I can see that there could be a lot of interesting research done on the tweets. They could track the zeitgeist and the awareness of issues in the news. How many people are discussing elections or cars or whatever. You might want to correlate it with all kinds of different things. It could be very useful, I think—just not for a very large audience. It’s more of academic interest.

I agree with @dpworkin.
And can’t we consider the internet an archive as it is in its current form?
If it is going to be archived they should definitely put this in.

I asked a question a while back about all our knowledge being stored digitally and then being lost over the years. This would be a bad thing for future anthropologists and probably other -ologists.

So, keeping the stuff around is good. Even an ancient clay tablet with tallies for a vegetable stall’s daily book keeping is considered an incredible insight into an an ancient person’s incredibly dull life.

But… storing it all digitally doesn’t make much sense to me, because eventually that’s going to fail.

I also think they should save my blogs.

It’s sortof pointless.

Whatever is on the internet is pretty much on there forever in one form or another no matter what you do.

@rebbel Your comment about the internet as an archive in its current form reminds me that Google is the current defacto librarian. I wonder if there are tools that Google has that would allow researchers to gather more information from the internet. I bet there are. I wonder if they are secret, or if they are just proprietary, so no one gets to see what they are, except Google employees.

Amazon did an interesting thing with Askville. People could only log into Askville using their Amazon account. In that way, Amazon could, if they wanted to, seek to correlate people’s buying habits with their comments on Askville. Askville uses topics, and they decided to force people to use a limited set of topics. This will make it easier to analyze. fluther topics are all over the place and there is no limit to the number someone can add, and no attempt to match all the different versions of different words into one standard topic heading.

I wonder what Amazon would conclude about me. The more I used Askville, the less I bought from Amazon…. I think.

Apparently, there is a private project in San Francisco called the Internet Archive that has been archiving materials since 1994.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Whatever is on the internet is pretty much on there forever in one form or another no matter what you do.
@rebbel And can’t we consider the internet an archive as it is in its current form?

I see the point, but it doesn’t quite work that way. It’s like a book – if you have the table of contents and the index, you don’t have the book.

Google does have the Internet indexed for us. If I am looking for Fluther questions regarding horses , Google will find some threads.

But if Fluther is down, I can’t go to any particular threads, read the answers in order, see all the participants in a thread, etc.

[Very NSFW] That’s a no brainer! All my stories on ASSTR!

It’s always better to have more information than less information. It’s sort of like hanging on to all of those old textbooks, you never know when you might need them.

Oh, they have to keep that Peter Pan guy, horribly designed page and all. He’s just one of the breakthrough personalities from the early days. Like an internet version of The Biograph Girl, or something.

The internet has spawned sub cultures and ways of life, and I think it would be ashamed if the artifacts are lost. The Greeks left all of their possessions behind, and now we can trace their way of life, and we can reconstruct the lives of people living in ancient times. People whose jobs rely on the internet (social media consultants, developers, it professionals), all of their lives would be lost to the ages.

Not to mention that the internet is a huge part of everyday life for everyone. Businesses, governments, individuals, academic institutions, academic institutions, hospitals and clinics, charities, exploration centers, and virtually any other kind of institution on earth use the internet for shipping, communicating, payments, entertainment, learning, exploration, problem solving, advertising, and the list goes on.

As an active internet user, I have a twitter account and I tweet many times daily. I use the internet to check my financial information, and I use the internet to study. I use the internet to entertain myself. I use the internet to communicate with friends on the other side of the world. I use the internet to check the news and stay on top of what’s important to me. I use the internet to fluther.

There’s a great line in Indiana Jones: Look at this. [holds up a silver pocket watch] It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless!

As a classics student, I see the importance of preserving the past. We think of our lives as the present, but in 1000 years, we will be the past. When archaeologists dig up our lives, what will they find? How will they interpret our time?

There is already an initiative which archived parts of the internet. I suggest you check it out.

I’d like to raise another point in favour of archiving tweets. This point uses twitter as an example, but can be applied to a lot more.

A piece of pottery from ancient Greece can tell an archaeologist many things. Even a shard, a piece of a complete pot, can tell us a lot about the people who used it. The type of clay that is used can tell us where in the world the clay was taken from. If the clay is from afghanistan, then there is evidence that the Greeks traded with people from the near east. The type of pottery can also be determined and tell us it’s use. If it was a kylix, then it was a drinking cup. This means that this society consumed wine or another alcoholic beverage. Residue can confirm this, and can also pinpoint where the wine was made, and what grapes were used, as well as fermenting techniques. Depictions on the cup could show a symposium, where a man reclines on a couch, with a table in front of him and a woman sitting on a stool next to the couch. This can tell us a lot about the symposium. I am writing a big paper on certain aspects of the symposium, and I can tell you that, just by looking at the paintings, never mind all the other details, tells me a lot. We can even find out the individual who made the kylix, as well as the person who painted it, by noting the style of the pot and paintings.

If you bothered to read all that, then I will relate it to twitter.

A tweet can also tell you all sorts of information. Let me search for “wine”. I found a random tweet: nemo8585 I am imagining sitting by the beach drinking mojito. Wine is good too, probably sauvignon blanc. Then, spend afternoon sailing. 4 minutes ago via Twittelator. The profile pic is a caucasian guy and an asian girl embracing.

This tweet tells me that the writer likes drinking alcohol. It also suggests that she lives somewhere near a beach. If location was turned on in this tweet, gps would tell me exactly where she is. She has access to french wine, which means that her city/state/province/country trades with France. Her profile pictures tells us that people were free to date whomever they chooses, and this even mixed across races. She must live in a blended society. She is wearing a short sleeve shirt, so modesty is not a big issue in her society. By looking at her profile, you see she is a law student and that women are allowed to represent people in court, and are allowed to participate in the government.

Now you see all the information we can get from a single random tweet.