Make Your Web Writing Live Forever

Pandora is the National Library of Australia’s web archive, a service similar to the Internet Archive. Unlike the Internet Archive, which aims to be comprehensive in its preservation, Pandora is discerning. It’s purpose is to archive web sites that are

• about Australia
• are by an Australian author on a subject of social, political, cultural, religious, scientific or economic significance and relevance to Australia
• are by an Australian author of recognised authority and make a contribution to international knowledge.

Pandora does include weblogs.

An example of a weblog archived by Pandora is Web Diary, a weblog originally written by Margo Kingston for the Sydney Morning Herald. Over time it established its own identity and Kingston set off on her own. Today Web Diary is written by others, but Pandora continues to archive it and make it available through the Trove search engine.

If you have a web project that you think should be accessible for posterity, just ask and the government stakeholders will consider your site for inclusion. But remember — your words will live forever, so choose them carefully.

How to reference Wikipedia

You will find often hear admonitions to never use Wikipedia as a source “because it can be updated by anyone”. In fact, only a tiny fraction of pages on Wikipedia can be changed, and those are the ones at addresses such as this: Wikipedia. For each change to such a page, another page is generated that is permanent.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Wikipedia’s archived changes can be found by clicking the ‘View history’ tab at the top of each page. To get the permanent version of the current page, look at the ‘Toolbox’ on the sidebar of every Wikipedia article, and click on ‘Permanent link’. If you need to cite a Wikipedia article in an academic essay, click on ‘Cite’ (note that the MLA and Harvard styles do not guard against updates).

Three tips on writing for Lonely Planet

(This post is specifically for my fellow students in Writing and Editing for Digital Media.)

(Image by Vladimir Menkov)

If you have chosen Lonely Planet Destinations to write stories for Assignment 3 Part 1, you might think that all of the substantial writing on the site is similar to this article on Hawaii for Beach Haters. In some ways it looks like content from a Lonely Planet book. Three features are particularly relevant to our assignment:
 

1. There is no standfirst.
2. The photos have been taken by Lonely Planet photographers, so there are no issues with copyright.
3. All links our internal to the Lonely Planet website.

Writing for Lonely Planet doesn’t have to be like this, however. The Tips & Articles cover a wide variety of writing styles, much like weblogs. This four day guide to Hawaii uses external links to entities that Lonely Planet doesn’t have pages for. This list of ten most common bar snacks in Rio uses images sourced from Flickr. I haven’t found a page that uses a standfirst, though.

I’ve discussed the above with Sarah and she agrees that this is what you can do if you choose to write for Lonely Planet:

1. You don’t have to write a standfirst (but try and choose a site that does use standfirsts for Part 2).
2. You can use Creative Commons-licensed images. Make sure the image links back to the image page, and the caption provides an attribution to the image owner that links back to her or his profile page. (Images licensed for non-commercial use only are acceptable for this assignment. We are not actually writing for Lonely Planet.)
3. You can link to an external sites if Lonely Planet does not have suitable pages.

Good luck, and remember, the assignment is due this coming Tuesday, 12 October!

Link to your Archive

I want to write about the value of archives. See what I did there? I linked back to my first post on this blog. When you write a weblog for a long time, you’ll find yourself doing that more and more, as the amount that you have already written on favoured topics grows and grows.

In my first post I listed four reasons to return to your archives. Here are four more:

1. To pick up an unfinished thought.
2. To disagree with an old position.
3. To make a connection between two or more old posts.
4. To provide a footnote to your current writing.

Although the praxis of weblogging is often extensive and connective, it can be intensive and reflective too. This kind of hypertextual writing is not only good for your own edification, your readers will appreciate it, as they are offered past gems, so that they too might develop a richer understanding of your topic.

But how else may you show readers the depth and breadth of your archives? Darren Rowse has four good mechanisms for highlighting your best content:

1. Interlinked Posts
2. Landing Pages
3. ‘Best of’ Sections
4. Sneeze Pages

See Rowse’s post for details.

I think that sneeze pages are a particularly interesting and underused technique. A sneeze page is a page of links to old posts, collected on a single principle (theme, time, hotness, etc). But don’t just make it a list of links: “Readers will use them a lot more and follow your suggested links into your archives if you take a little time to introduce what the page is about and to describe what they’ll get when they arrive at the page.”

Value your archives, because your archives have value!

(You will notice from the dates embedded in Rowse’s URLs that I am utilising his archives in writing this post! Don’t just read your own archives!)

Everyone should watch Network

Following one of Jay Rosen’s recent talks on the people formerly known as the audience, there were some comments on the movie Network (1976) over on Stephaniii’s blog. I felt like an unequal contributor in this discussion because I’d never seen the classic film, so I decided to remedy this with a visit to my local video store.

I’m not going to review the film here, other than to endorse it heartily, both as a reflection on American anxieties in the 70s, and as a speculation on the logical outcomes of that period’s dominant ideologies. If you want to know more about it, check out Rotten Tomatoes. But let me act as a human recommendation engine, and suggest that if you liked Network, you might like the British television series The Prisoner (1967) or the J.G. Ballard novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

One surprise about the movie was that the famous speech — “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more” — does not occur at the end. I guess that a lifetime of Hollywood movies has given me certain structural expectations.

Here is another scene from further along in the film, where the owner of the network explains global capital:

You’re welcome to imagine Thomas L. Friedman talking in this way. As John Ralston Saul has said, watch out for things that are sold as inevitable.

How to get old tweets

Like Facebook, Twitter keeps everyone’s content. Unlike Facebook, links are provided even to the oldest content.

Here’s the first tweet of Krissy Bush, Stephen Fry, and Neil Gaiman (found via My First Tweet).

You would have to click “more” for a long time to see those tweets, however. In fact, I understand that you can’t get back that far by clicking “more”. Even if you could, it is slow, and I suspect the Fail Whale would pay you a visit before you got too far.

Furthermore, neither Twitter itself nor Google can find old tweets. (Do you think no one was tweeting about Rihanna in 2009?) According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engline Land, this is because there are too many tweets to search.

It’s interesting to contrast Twitter, which has been described as microblogging, with weblogs proper, as Scott Rosenberg has done:

Blogs privilege the “now”. New stuff always goes on top. But they also create a durable record of “then” — as I have learned in spending the last couple of years digging through the back catalog of blogging. One of the great contributions of blogging software is to organize the past for anyone who writes frequently online. Before blogs, with each new addition to a website we had to think, where does this go, and how will I find it later? Blog tools, as personal content management systems, ended that era.

Twitter is great at “now”. But as far as I can tell, it’s lousy at “then”.

Do you use Twitter? Do you want your old tweets, or think others might? Do you ever think about “then”?

How to get your old Facebook statuses

Facebook wants to be the centre of your digital life. On it you can share your photos, videos, and what’s on your mind. But is this sharing ephemeral, like conversation at a party, or is it permanent, like a scrapbook?

In fact, when I log in, it’s easy to see my photos and videos. Beneath my profile picture I see links to “View Photos of Me” and “View Videos of Me”. The central column has a “Photos” tab. If I follow the latter link I can see all my photos grouped into albums, inside which they are divided into pages. I can quickly find photos I uploaded three years ago. But what about what I’ve written?

"What's on your mind?" Facebook now puts this question at its heart, a la Twitter. It's easy to tap out one moody word or a paragraph of political opinion. Sometimes it might be nice to go back and relive the past through these words.

Attributes of Archives

To serve as an archive, Facebook first needs to retain all user-generated content. Thanks to the classmate who this week pointed out that Facebook does keep all your old posts! (Please leave a comment and claim your credit!)

Facebook then needs to make user content both findable and addressable. Findable means that you are easily able to find something, either through navigation or search. Photos on Facebook are easily found through navigation. Addressable means that you are easily able to link to something, so it can be referred to elsewhere (e.g. email, bookmarks, a newer status). Photos on Facebook all have their own page with their own URL.

If you click the timestamp of a Facebook status on the Wall, you will be taken to an archive page for that status, with a URL of its own, also called a permalink.

New statuses have their own URL too. But the real test for text isn’t what you’ve just posted, it’s the old stuff, the classics, so I decided to find some the hard way and then see if I could find it the easy way. I scrolled to the bottom of the Wall; I clicked “Older Posts”; I repeated this process until there were no older posts — I could see the post that said “David joined Facebook”. This process is actually pretty fast thanks to Facebook’s responsive servers, though admittedly I am a light poster.

And here is my first status update:

It turns out that Facebook organises its data differently after early 2008. Before then, statuses do not have a permalink.

New statuses are addressable, old statuses are not. If you got on Facebook in 2008 or later, this isn’t a problem.

See What Facebook Stores

I confirmed that identifiers are not generated for old posts by peeking at the raw data. You can too by following these steps:

1. Login to Facebook
2. Go to Facebook Developers User API
3. Click on the feed link in the Connections table
4. Browser will load a “page” that is a Javascript data structure containing your latest Wall posts
5. To see more posts, append &limit=250 to your URL

You’ll see that newer posts have an id like 123456789_123456789012345 (where the first part is your Facebook user id), which is used for the permalink, but older posts have no such attribute.

(Thanks to Lipsis for pointing me in the right direction.)

(Note that the web is littered with methods for accessing Facebook’s back end that no longer work, because Facebook periodically changes its API. The same fate may befall my process.)

Statuses Can’t Be Found

Unfortunately the situation for findability is worse.

There are no pages where you can browse your archives by date a la WordPress’s daily, monthly, and yearly archives.

There is a search function — which is probably a surprise to most users. The search box at the top of the screen doesn’t just find users or pages, as its aggressively dynamic results suggest.

At the bottom of the dynamic drop-down list there is an entry for "See More Results". Click this to be taken to a search results page.

The search results page shows Users, Pages, Post by Friends, and Web Results (supplied by Bing). You can then select a link to “View All Posts By Friends”. Unfortunately this won’t return anything more recent than “about a week ago”.

(Is there a Law of Web 2.0 Conservation? Google can’t do social networking and Facebook can’t do search?)

Facebook Is Not A Good Archive

Your writing on Facebook is mostly addressable, but isn’t findable. Rather than a scrapbook you keep on the shelf, it’s more like the diary that you lose somewhere in the roof.

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no reason why Facebook can’t generate identifiers for all your old posts, and even less reason that Facebook can’t introduce a decent search function. It makes sense that it will do so at some point in the future. After all, the more you have invested in Facebook, the stickier it becomes. Even the most random status can turn out to have value, and Facebook, as a business, must capitalise on everything it can.

The Internet Remembers

Twelve-year-old article on web shrines by Mark Bernstein.

A weblog obituary for Milon Buneta (archived in the Internet Archive).

A day to remember:

Wendy Francis has been archived

Political candidate Wendy Francis (wendy4senate) tweeted the following on Sunday: “Children in homosexual relationships are subject to emotional abuse. Legitimising gay marriage is like legalising child abuse”. I can’t provide you a link to her tweet, because she subsequently deleted it. It’s gone from her tweetstream — but it’s not gone!

To begin with, many people have retweeted it, as a search for the tweet’s keywords shows. This, however, isn’t a reliable archive. These are all manual retweets that might have been tampered with by their retweeters. Automated retweets provided by Twitter are deleted when the original tweet is deleted.

This is why the ABC, when reporting on the story, labeled the tweet text as what “other Twitter users say the post said”. They then went on to allow Francis to claim, “I think that’s been a retweet. I don’t think that was the original tweet.” It is somewhat sad that the ABC — with a website, an international radio network, a 24-hour news channel, and Chris Uhlmann — clearly was not following all of our political candidates on Twitter, the kind of journalism within reach even of citizens.

used with permission

Luckily Twitter user Toby Nieboer had the presence of mind to take a screenshot of Francis’s tweets passing through his mobile phone. Twenty minutes after publishing an article on the affair, Sydney Morning Herald tech editor Ben Grubb asked if he could use that screenshot to update the article. Then someone from the Brisbane Times emailed him a screenshot of the wendy4senate Twitter page with the incriminating tweets. This second screenshot now graces the updated article.

Grubb also points to a blog post on Francis’s campaign website that recapitulates her tweets (something else the ABC failed to do). This post is now gone with an Error 404 — but it’s not gone either! A trivial look at Google’s cache reveals the incriminating post.

The elephant in the room here is RSS. Twitter provides RSS feeds of each user’s tweetstream. WordPress, Francis’s weblog software, provides an RSS feed of her posts. Anyone who subscribed to these feeds has a permanent record of Francis’s statements. Anyone in this case includes companies that run centralised feed aggregators such as Bloglines and Google Reader.

The thing to understand about Web 2.0 is that you can delete your tweet or post, you can delete your account or weblog, but what you said is never gone.

Two Sides of Politics

Lauren, a political scientist, declares this election a dud: “We’re talking about one of the least interesting parts of the body because we are so revoltingly uninspired.”

Meanwhile, James is worried about the proposed internet filter: “If Australia’s major parties are not willing to bring web filters to the election, it would be incredibly unfortunate if they were to try and sneak such a thing through during the next term of government.”

Many of my friends have opposed the filter by attending protests, writing letters, and maintaining awareness of its status. They are inspired. The campaign isn’t so uninteresting if you see yourself affected by it.

And there are so many major issues currently that we will all be affected, so why don’t we see that?

Grog is a blogger covering the election, who writes here about the failure of the old media. He’s interested in disability issues and (like James) the NBN. Blog posts such as his are part of the new media, citizen journalism, Web 2.0 — but so are the tweets that launched the earlobe discussion.

Will Web 2.0 entrench the structures of political campaigning in this country, or will it transcend and transform them? Australia will be voting on social media: uninspiring, or inspiring?

The Future of the Web is the Past of the Web

I want to write about the value of archives.

I wrote one weblog for ten years. I would not have kept it but for the value of the archive. I returned to find links; I returned to look up the date of something important; I returned out of pride to show someone something that I had written; I returned to re-learn what I once knew, fitfully, intermittently. And having enjoyed the archives so, I could never help adding one more post for possible future enjoyment.

This focus has certainly made me interested in the archives of others. I visit and revisit old posts of my favourite bloggers. Sometimes I even dig in the Wayback Machine for blog posts that are no longer with us.

Time and again I have heard the story of discovering a new web comic: the discoverer is enthralled, navigates to the first comic, and spends the rest of the night reading until they reach the latest one — only to realise that the comic has been long abandoned. I have never heard that story with a weblog as its object. For weblogs it seems the story goes like this: the discoverer is enthralled, navigates to the latest entry, realises the blog has been long abandoned, and stops reading.

If only our tools could help us. Imagine if I could point Google Reader at a derelict blog and tell it to start feeding me posts as if I was reading five years ago. The technology is there, it just requires the interest.