• 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.

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).

(Image by Vladimir Menkov)

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!

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!)

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.

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”?

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.

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.

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.

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

A day to remember:

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.

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?