Dr Karl Stolley

My campus magazine just wrote up a little piece about the work I do in Web production and sustainability. Part of the article talked about the design work that I did with Kairos; another part of the article talked about how when a URL disappears–whether because of deleted file or an expired domain name–it threatens the sustainability of the Web and the ethos of sites doing the linking.

As irony would have it, the piece appeared the same day that Kairos’s technorhetoric.net URL somehow wound up in the hands of one of the many domain brokers that have bots waiting around for domains to expire. Meaning that the URL in the article is bad, as are the many other pages and articles that provide links to the technorhetoric.net domain.

This is unfortunate, and I hope that the Kairos people can somehow secure their domain from the broker who now controls it. But Kairos’s trouble is instructive about the care and feeding of domain names.

As everyone who’s ever bought a domain knows, you don’t really buy a domain–you effectively lease it for a period of time, usually ranging from a year to three years. Fail to renew the domain, and one of those automated brokers will snatch it up.

Now most domain registrars will email you before your domain expires. They want your business. Some will email multiple times. But of course–and I suspect this might have happened with Kairos–you can’t depend on those emails to be sent. A server glitch on the registrar’s end or a spam filter on yours is all it takes to prevent that important reminder from reaching you. (It also goes without saying that you shouldn’t register domains with a school or work email address, which may expire when you graduate or change jobs.)

Besides, the identity you establish on a domain is far too precious a thing to be left to your registrar to remind you to renew.

So do the smart thing, and put your domain expirations on your calendar. And then mark the calendar a month out, too, so that a failed credit card payment or other glitch does not wind up costing you your domain name.

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A number of people have expressed interest in having a collection of everything that was Tweeted at Computers and Writing 2009 with the #cw09 hashtag. However, because there were more than 1500 Tweets from the conference (!), it is not possible for any one person to archive all of the Tweets.

If we are going to have such an archive, it will take a community effort. And fast–we have less than a day or two to do this.

First, here’s what you should do (I’ll explain why next): go to your favorite, feed-enabled Web browser and enter this URL, replacing USERNAME with your Twitter username and PAGE with a number starting with 1 and increasing it by one until you no longer have any results left:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23cw09&rpp=100&from=USERNAME&page=PAGE

Each time you run this query, right-click and choose View Page Source; in a good browser, you will see the raw XML (and not the styled HTML page that browsers like Safari and Firefox generate for RSS). Your ATOM/RSS will look something like this (my most recent 100 #cw09 tweets).

Copy that entire chunk of source by right-clicking and choosing Select All, and paste it into a good text editor: either WordPad on Windows (*not* Notepad) or TextEdit on Mac. (In TextEdit, choose Format > Make Plain Text if it’s trying to save as RTF.)

Save the file as like username-cw09-page-1.rss.txt for the first page, username-cw09-page-2.rss.txt for the second page, and so on. Because of the way XML works, do not paste all of your results into a single file; keep a separate file for each time you up the page number in the URL.

We’ll have to figure out as a community where to share and post these files, and how to (eventually) get them into a searchable, sharable database as an SQL file. But for now, just be sure to grab your Tweets, save them, and keep them safe.

The reason this is necessary is that Twitter will only return 1500 results for a given search (like #cw09), and it will only return results that are less than roughly a week old. So that’s why we have to do this individually, and do it fast. After sometime on Thursday of this week, the Tweets from during the conference will rapidly begin to disappear from the searchable Tweet stream.

4 comments.

I was fascinated by the #CNNfail Tweetstream Sunday night. The “Tweetstream” is nothing more than the realtime updates to a search for a particular word or phrase on Twitter at search.twitter.com. but when I posted about it to Facebook from Twitter via Selective Twitter Updates, some of my non-tweeting friends reported being unable to decipher what one of them described as Twitter’s “jargon.”

Well, the Tweetstream is not really plagued by what I would call jargon. Rather, Twitter users have developed their own shorthand for communicating within Twitter’s hallmark 140-character post limit. (And it is important to note that the conventions I’m listing here have emerged from the community’s broader rhetorical practice, and not as features designed by Twitter the website/service itself.)

Here’s a tweet, or actually a retweet, of mine roughly as it would have appeared in the #CNNfail Tweetstream:

karlstolley RT @timleberecht: How #CNN fail(ed) – screenshots from news sites worldwide http://bit.ly/bqgHN #iranelection #cnnfail #fb

• So, the first item that appears is the username of the person who’s doing the tweeting; no big mystery there.
• Next up is RT, or “retweet,” which is a sort of citation mechanism in Twitter that, among other things, cause tweets to be passed on beyond one’s own immediate group of followers.
• @username, which is the syntax for both referring to and directing messages publicly to another Twitter user, based on her username. In the Tweet above, I’m retweeting a tweet written by @timlebrecht, whose Tweet was just one that I spotted in the Tweetstream.
• Tim also uses a hashtag, #CNN, in the body of his post; hashtags are another Twitter convention and can be used on words in the message (as #CNN is) or at the end (or even the beginning) of a post, as #iranelection and #cnnfail are. I also added the #fb hashtag so that this particular Tweet would update my Facebook status, as is the convention with the Selective Twitter Updates app.
• http://bit.ly/bqgHN, which is the URL that Tim was pointing to; bit.ly is a URL shortening service, like is.gd and tinyurl.com, which keep the URLs short (but which also have problems of their own in terms of long-term viability/accuracy).

Which is all just to say that RT, @username, and #hashtags are nothing more than metadata about the actual content of the post. True, they are visually noisy to newcomers, but such is the nature of new forms of digital expression.

But obviously, even with this explanatory list in mind, there is no shortage of noise on the Tweetstream. My own experience reading it, especially on a stream that was moving as fast as #CNNfail was Sunday night, is that the colorization brought on by hyperlinked hashtags and usernames helps me visually sort through to what I want to read: too many usernames, as in a string of retweets, or too many hashtags lumped at the beginning or end of a tweet, and I’m not likely to read carefully. I’ll look for the black text of tweets that will likely be more informational and, with luck, something that hasn’t been tweeted already.

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As of the seventh edition of the MLA Handbook, “the MLA no longer recommends the inclusion of URLs in the works-cited-list entries for Web publications.”

The logic behind this is that URLs are often long and unwieldy (ironically, the worst offenders in this department are often major bibliographic indexes and article repositories, not to mention the mile-longers offered up by Amazon.com), and that retyping URLs is not nearly as efficient as simply Googling for the author and title of a work. (On this second point, I agree; but as I suggest below, omitting URLs is not the solution.)

There are two significant flaws with this logic.

The first is that the MLA seems to be imagining a web governed by restrictive copyright, one that is free from Creative Commons and other forms of permissive content licensing. Only in a locked-down copyright scenario does the assumption hold that a given document on the web would have one single, solitary location–not to mention one single, solitary version. In reality, neither is true: not only because of Creative Commons licensing (which leading web-available scholarly journals such as Kairos and First Monday openly encourage their authors to use), but also because of RSS feeds, JSON, and other modes of content syndication that make one piece of content easily published in multiple locations. Add to this sites like the World Wide Consortium that explicitly and meticulously version all of their pages, and the “Just Google it!” idea behind omitting URLs quickly reveals its limits.

The second flaw in the MLA’s logic is that it misses the entire point of URLs (or more generally URI: Uniform Resource Identifier) on the web. URLs are the only means for reliably referring to a particular item on the web and other parts of the internet. URLs are also the only means for accessing pages stored in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which is an essential scholarly tool. I cannot say how many times I have read articles, particularly in the fields of computers and writing and digital humanities, that cited now-defunct websites and web pages, only to find them via Wayback. Without a URL/URI in those articles’ lists of references, this type of crucial digital archive reading would be impossible. And while one could argue that Wayback needs a text search, it would reveal the same problems of uniqueness in referring to live pages. Read the rest of this entry.

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Clay Spinuzzi has probably the best description of the value of Twitter that I’ve read, something that he calls the “ambient status” that emerges from ones collected followers:

I get a sense of the trends in the fields in which I work, but also the well-being of my contacts. I see when they’re engaging in activities similar to mine. I can tell when they’re struggling with particular issues. I can get a sense of what they’re reading, writing, and studying.

The problem is that Twitter does not make it terribly easy to find other people, at least in its basic, twitter.com-based form. If someone’s not using their full name or an email address that you know, finding that person is next to impossible. And finding people generally is either pure luck or the haphazard function of sites like twollow.com, which sets your account to automatically follow someone if they tweet a word from a list of keywords that you specify.

But other means of self-organizing around Twitter are emerging, such as TwittGroups.com, which helps establish membership lists and, more importantly, a shared hashtag for the group. (Hashtags are nothing more than a hash, #, followed by a word or acronym; hashtags.org is a key site that aggregates hashtags.)

The people I follow on Twitter who are also a part of rhetoric, composition, writing, technical communication, and so on, tend to use conference-based hashtags. But it occurred to me that what we really needed was a shared hashtag that could be used all of the time, apart from conferences. In the rhetoric and writing community, #cccc09 is in wide use because of the conference is going on now.

But what happens next week? Read the rest of this entry.

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