Washington
– Acknowledging the growing importance of social media, the Library of Congress
said on Wednesday that it plans to digitally archive every public
"tweet" since the launch of microblogging service Twitter in 2006.
Fittingly, the library announced the news in a Twitter post to its 50,000
followers on the service. Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets a day.
"It boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about
ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data," wrote Matt
Raymond, the library’s director of communications, in a blog post.
"And
I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly
conceive."
The Library of Congress said that it has been collecting
materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential
campaign web sites in 2000, and currently holds more than 167 terabytes of Web-based
information.
Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/vhkgj
(Library of Congress blog)
