WTF?

[unixronin]

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard:  The Library of Congress has just added a digital archive of the entirety of public traffic on Twitter since its founding four years ago.

WTF FOR?!?

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I see it in part as a failure to distinguish between collecting and organizing information, and accumulating random data for the sake of accumulating data. Even if one can find and track the context, 99% of twitter is ephemeral babble, not only of consequence only to the speaker and a relatively small number of listeners, but relevant strictly to that particular moment in time. Taken as a whole, sans context-of-the-moment, its overall signal-to-noise ratio surely has to be asymptotically approaching zero.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Sure, but see the point Databeast made above.

That said, I hope the archeaologists of 9,000 AD have awesomely, brilliantly, incredibly good data-mining software.

Because at the rate we've been packing away information for them these last few centuries (and *especially* these last couple of decades), they're damned well going to need it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That said, I hope the archeaologists of 9,000 AD have awesomely, brilliantly, incredibly good data-mining software.

I'll have to remind TTK to leave a set on long-term archival media for them. ;)