Some­times we tell peo­ple that things live for­ever on the inter­net and that any­one can find them (so don’t post that pic­ture of your­self drink­ing alco­hol, young man), but I want to high­light how some impor­tant things from just a cou­ple of months ago are becom­ing impos­si­ble to find. If we’re not care­ful, the haystack is going to dis­ap­pear, never mind the needle.

For exam­ple, take the dis­cus­sion that hap­pened on Twit­ter dur­ing ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing just under two months ago. The Meet­ing had a hash­tag for track­ing con­tent (#alamw09), and almost every­one used it most of the time. There was a lot going on in that tag, so much so that I thought it was a tip­ping point for the Asso­ci­a­tion in terms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools. I even debriefed what hap­pened on Twit­ter for ALA staff after­wards so that they’d be able to see the patterns.

But try to find that dis­cus­sion now, and it’s almost impos­si­ble. Most peo­ple (includ­ing me) rely on Twitter’s search engine (which was for­merly called “Sum­mize” and run by a dif­fer­ent com­pany until Twit­ter bought it). If you search Twit­ter now for the #alamw09 hash­tag, you get exactly one page of results (yes­ter­day there were two), and only a cou­ple of those tweets were actu­ally posted dur­ing the event itself. If you look up #alamw09 at hashtags.org, you’ll get more results from the Meet­ing itself, but there’s still only one page, and you had to have man­u­ally fol­lowed the hashtags.org Twit­ter account for them to have tracked your tweets, so even if you could see older results than what shows, it would be an incom­plete archive at best. Search Tech­no­rati for #alamw09 and you get eight blog posts. Iron­i­cally, you can get most of the pub­lic tweets from Mid­win­ter by search­ing Friend­Feedlooking for anything from #ala2008 on Twitter, although there again FriendFeed saves the day, but for how long?

So for all of our aggregation attempts of that Twitter content, they may only work in the moment for the moment. It turns out they're mis­cel­la­neous *and* search­able in only one place (for now), a pretty bad com­bi­na­tion in hind­sight. Thank heav­ens I favor­ited in Twit­ter so many of the alamw09 tweets, although that’s still not ideal. I have to man­u­ally page through them to find the ones I want, and I already have 35 pages of favorites.

After Mid­win­ter, I tried to start mov­ing my #alamw09 favorites into Ever­note so that I’d be able to search and group them, but I haven’t had time to com­plete that process, and I just can’t seem to train myself to add new tweets there as I favorite them. The ratio of effort between click­ing on a star and fill­ing out a few words of meta­data is just too much in the mid­dle of my day, so this looms as a project in my future if I really want to save this stuff. Even then, there’s no guar­an­tee Ever­note will stick around, but at least I can export from it.

So if you were using a hash­tag to aggre­gate con­tent, think­ing it would be eas­ier to find it all again in the future, think again. You’re going to have to do some­thing more proac­tive and man­ual than rely­ing on Twitter’s search engine or Google. You’ll have to decide what level of ephemer­a­li­ness you’re com­fort­able with for that con­ver­sa­tion, because you may not be able to get back to it if you let some­one else man­age access to the archive. In this con­text, it’s a shame so much of the con­ver­sa­tion has moved away from blog com­ments (where indi­vid­u­als can openly archive it) to Twit­ter and Friend­Feed. And if you’re a gov­ern­ment or archive orga­ni­za­tion look­ing to pre­serve this kind of dig­i­tal con­tent, the stakes are get­ting raised on you.

Am I miss­ing any other options for find­ing past hash­tag con­ver­sa­tions? Please tell me yes in the comments.

Adden­dum: Poten­tial ideas for archiv­ing — you could sub­scribe to the RSS feed of a hash­tag in an RSS reader and export them, right? Or sub­scribe to the RSS feed via email? Other ideas?