Twitter and the Library of Congress

Print

Two great pieces of writing from Fred Stutzman on the Twitter/Library of Congress deal. Fred is an incredible commentator and analyst on Social Networking…if you aren’t reading him, you should be. From the second post:

If there’s one thing that social media has taught us, it is that if you post anything to the web, it stays there forever.  Of course, this is empirically false.  Companies go out of business, databases corrupt, servers crash, indexes get expunged, identifiers get mixed up, and even with the best intentions and good backups, data are lost.  Think about the Google search results for your name.  Are they the same they were 1, 3, or 5 years ago?  While it is likely that you could tell me tons about new results that have come online over that time period, could you tell me about the ones that have gone offline?

Twitter and the Library of Congress

Is is time to cancel your Twitter account?

I don’t agree with all of his points, but it’s one of the more thoughtful takes on the Library’s acquisition that I’ve seen.