Last night the first public election debate was on live television. Fortunately RTL offered a livestream of the debate on their website for those of us who don’t own a tv. The debate itself was almost unbearable to watch with politicians constantly interrupting each other and throwing corny oneliners at each other. The #rtldebat became a trending topic on Twitter as well as two of the participating politicians: Rutte and Wilders.
As I’ve previously told, Twitter has increased my engagement with politics since I no longer own a tv. Backchannels on Twitter during live events or live debates in the Netherlands are very active and contain a nice balance between commentary, humor and cynicism. And last night it included commentary of politicians who weren’t invited to this particular debate.
The debate from last night was filled with tons of clichés and one-liners and was hard to watch without either the power of relativity, humor or cynicism. That’s why I came up with the bullshit bingo consisting of all those worn-out one-liners. I tweeted the picture during the end of the debate and it became a trending picture on Mobypicture.
My picture ended up on tv in a short segment on the election debate:1
All copyright goes to RTL but they don’t offer embed codes and since they used my picture without my consent I guess I can publish this small clip for my friends and family without their consent ;) [↩]
XKCD has been one of my favorite sites for a few years now. The cartoons are always geeky, snarky and very often concern contemporary new media issues. This one on blogging is, once again, just hilariously exemplary of the blogging industry:
XKCD makes me *smirk* while doing research, for example this oldie on Twitter as exemplary of the real-time web:
Google’s indexing of the updatesphere is going quite well with the recent news that it will soon show all tweets going back to March 21, 2006. However, there seems to be a very basic flaw in its search design: it returns the platform name for a query! So if I search for Google it will include Google Buzz and if I search for Twitter it will return everything posted from Twitter.
I can imagine a finegrained search similar to “Google” site:http://awebsitehere.com that would allow you so specify within which platform you would like to search. A search query would then look like this: “Google” platform:Twitter or “iranrevolution” platform:FriendFeed.
A few hours ago the following tweet by @librarycongress appeared in my timeline “Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets. More info here http://go.usa.gov/ik4”
All your tweets are belong to us
This is big. The ENTIRE archive containing ALL tweets? But if we read the official announcement on the Library of Congress blog it states “all public tweets” which seems like it will not include protected accounts and direct messages. The LoC blog went down due to the amount of attention so they decided to post the announcement on Facebook (as it contained more than 140 characters ;)) where a discussion immediately started off. Users are either surprised by this acquisition because they don’t see the value in it, or they are upset because they have acquired their personal tweets. However, as Manuel Magaña notes on Facebook, everytime you press “tweet” you agree to Twitter’s Terms of Service. Even if Twitter feels like a common good, it is still a company that can sell your personal user generated content. However, the Library of Congress is a “federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress” (About) and as such serves the members of Congress which may raise critical inquiries of using Twitter’s archive for political purposes and investigations.
Twitter as a historical tool
So how could the LoC tweet archive be used by researchers? In response to the value of the Twitter archive Randy Rice on Facebook describes how Twitter may serve as a people’s history for historians. With the Digital Methods Initiative we have previously used Twitter to write about the Iran (Green) Revolution by using tweets containing the #iranelection hashtag. Twitter is currently very limited in its use for historical accounts as documented by people present at events. Twitter’s search archive only goes back two weeks and only a custom built scraper may be able to retrieve older tweets. This is not within the skills of the sociologist or historian but an accessible archive may open up a new, huge, sourceset. How does one make sense of an enormous database filled with tweets? One way is to scrape hashtags for a certain event. Two questions remain: 1. will the entire archive become public? 2. will it contain a search function?
A mosaic of humanity
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s “I Want You To Want Me” is an installation that documents our search for love on online dating sites. By scraping all the public data from dating sites it is “a very fertile ground for building a mosaic of humanity” according to Harris. When we enter our thoughts and feelings into databases we can use these for datamining to say something about our culture. And that is exactly what the Library of Congress seems to want. It acknowledges that not only books are part of our cultural heritage but also the updates on Twitter:
We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations. (Raymond 2010)
During the CPoV Wikipedia conference there was a lot of activity on Twitter on the backchannel #cpov. Fanatic tweeter and co-organizer Nishant Shah even got temporarily barred from Twitter due to “excessive tweeting.” API calls are the new scarcity online! Reaching the API limit often marks you as a spammer.
On top of that Twitter search is amnesic and the #cpov conference tweets will not be available anymore in two weeks. Fortunately Daniel Mietchen made a small movie from his favorite #cpov conference tweets. It’s wonderful to see how a Twitter backchannel could provide information for those not being able to attend the conference.
A few weeks ago I noticed during the BrightNight event that my tweets did not appear in the backchannel. After extensively searching the Twitter Support pages on ‘Tweets Not In Search/Hashtags not working‘ I found out that for some reason Twitter had blocked/removed my tweets from search.
After some shout outs on Twitter, it appeared I wasn’t the only one. The initial Support pages said that the issue would resolve itself over time but after a few weeks I was getting impatient. Hashtags have become an important feature of Twitter and I felt left out during conferences, not being able to participate in the backchannel.
Yesterday @bertboerland sent me a link to file a request to be remove the constraints that have been put, for unknown reasons (I might have been marked as a spam account), on my account. Within a day I received word from Twitter that my tweets appear in search again.
Search is a core feature of Twitter as it is being used to retrieve hashtags related to a particular event for backchannels. Search could become even more powerful if Twitter would extend search retrieval beyond two weeks. It would make extensive analysis possible without scheduling a scraper.
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