Social Archivist

There’s so much emphasis on making sure you back up your files otherwise things could be lost forever. This is just part of the solution. Another important aspect is organizing the copies (disks, tapes, CDs, DVDs) into some sort of system which can be easily found later on (easier said than done).

Often overlooked, however, is the meta-data (context) for the files.

Much like the tin full of photos with an occasional penciled name or date on the back, will our digital backups be confusing puzzles without the proper context for people in the future?

I was thinking about this while working on a book of my son’s first year: I must put in names of people and places for his future reference!

Created using Blurb, NEWYORK2IDAHO documents a father and son road trip in April 2009 using tweets from a Blackberry while on the trip to narrate the photos.

Anthony Robertson used Blurb to print a book of Tweets (protected account) called Advice for my son.

In the forward he writes (emphasis mine):

I have thought about this project for some time. I have often wondered what little tidbits of information I should give you. I started to slowly post these 140-character granules of wisdom to Twitter; Twitter acting as a kind of repository of ideas. After several months of accumulation, I started to come up with a plan where the granules would have a bit of longevity.

When I found out I had rheumatoid arthritis and upon turning forty, I knew I wanted some of the ideas I have communicated over the years to stick within your brain.

Print Your Twitter is a handy little tool for doing just that.

You can easily delete tweets you don’t want in your archive, filter by keyword and optionally also include your friends’ tweets. The bit I liked the most is that it automatically pulled in my twitpics into the page:

Why not try taking a friend’s tweets/Facebook status updates for the year and using a tool like Wordle to create a personalized greeting card for them?

Inspiration for the wording inside the card came from Imogen Heap’s new single First Train Home: “What matters to you, doesn’t matter, matter to me”.

If you’re looking for a really quick way to print off all your Tweets without having any control over the design or format, try Tweetbook.

It only takes a few minutes before your own PDF file is ready for printing.

Here’s how a page in mine looked:

This looks promising: Twiary is a soon-to-be-launched service that will use your Twitter-account to “create something really beautiful”.

In March 2009, James Bridle compiled all two years of his tweets into a 270 page hardback book. James thinks he was the first to do it. It looks just like a novel:

The process was quite involved and time consuming. He wrote his own script to pull down all his tweets (although there are plenty of options out there now) and then pulled them into InDesign using another script before printing it with Lulu.

“When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.” – James

In the comments section of his blog post, Benedict Leigh says:

“The loss of ephemeral daily information about life passing, not for me (or even my children) but for grandchildren is one of the things that worry me about the way I use sites like this.”

In January this year Ben Terrett and Russell Davies printed 1,000 copies of their own newspaper full of things their friends had written on the internet.

The newspaper just contains tweets, blog posts and photos.

On the last page, Ben And Russell say: “2009 feels like a year for printing and making real stuff in the real world. It’s going to be exciting.”

What a fabulous gift to receive!

See more photos over at Flickr.

What’s more, they’re going to make it easier for you to do the same. Check out Newspaper Club.

If you would like to try out my application to export your old Facebook statuses, click here – once you’ve given the application the right permissions, a CSV file will be downloaded. It’s very much in beta, so please leave me feedback.

I am currently testing out a little Facebook application I’ve written to export and save all my old status updates (I’m surprised no-one else has done this?). I am only able to pull out ones since August last year – not all of them, even though they are stored in Facebook.

I recently saved all my old Facebook statuses in an incredibly painful way* – which made me realise how un-user-friendly it is to look back in time on Facebook. There’s no “browse by month” navigation like on many blogs. While there is a feed of your latest Facebook statuses, it only shows your last 10 statuses.

* I clicked on my profile page, then painfully kept clicking “Older posts” until I finally got back to when I joined Facebook in early 2007 and then saved this massive webpage to my computer (~10MB).