Library of Congress, Twitter, and catching up after a vacation

I just got back from a week long vacation, and while I was there I didn’t really check my computer; I checked my email, prepared for an interview, and thats about it.  So, now that I have returned, I’m presented with a problem: should I try to catch up on things like my Google Reader and Twitter, or should I just give up and let all that stuff go away unread?

Well, I’ve already kind of decided what I’m going to, and that decision was made for me by the set up of the websites. With my Google Reader, I’m trying to catch up on the things I missed, quickly scanning through titles and deciding whether or not I’ll read the whole post.  A few feeds I’ve already marked as read instead of scrolling though them; however, I’m skimming through most of them.  This will take awhile (I still have over 1000 unread), but I’m still going to do it.

Twitter, however, has a built in ephemeral quality.  There’s no way to know how many tweets you haven’t read, at least on the main Twitter website and Brizzly, the client that I use.  Even if I could go back and see what I have and haven’t read, I don’t think I would go back and read many of the tweets.  Tweets are more heat of the moment sort of posts and, without context, a lot of the meaning can be lost.  This makes me think about how the Library of Congress is going to make Tweets accessible.  Are they just going to dump the tweets out there, making a giant database of text available by itself, or are they going to try and surround it with context to allow people to make sense of more of the tweets?  Are they going to try and make a database of hashtag meanings? The newspaper Guardian did this in a slight way by creating twitter recaps of World Cup matches.  They measured the popularity of certain terms on Twitter in real time as the match progressed and it was very interesting.  But adding this sort of context to 140 characters worth of information will obviously involve a lot of work.  It will be interesting to see what LoC decides to do when and how they make this database available.