THE NEW SCHOLARSHIP – AT 7:30 P.M. ET:  Andrew Malcolm, of the L.A. Times's Top of the Ticket blog, reports that the Library of Congress now will collect the writings of...you:

Breaking: OMG WTH @LibraryCongress sez its acquired evry Tweet evr sent. Will store every 1! 50mil/day. B careful what u say now. Its 4evr

RT that!

Do we need 2 keep all these Tweets? What u-no-who had 4 bfast, when whos-its goes zzzzz. Who was ROFLMAO!!

Don't forget, was also some history including the 1st prez victory Tweet evr by 1st blk prez evr. And who knows what indiscreet Tweet Twittered recently will come back to haunt a future presidential candidate?

There are billions of Tweets already in existence since the social network began in March of 2006. How will they ever find enough drawer space to store them all?

As Matt Raymond, the Library's official blogger, notes, the precious national library resource has been about more than books for a long while already. It's been gathering online stuff ever since ever since.

Matt says:

"The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress."

COMMENT:  Well, now we're all immortal.  Imagine, all those tweets you wrote will be read by researchers a thousand years from now. 

Wait.  A thousand years from now nobody will be reading English.  So relax.

April 14, 2010