140 * 2500 = 45,000

Looks like a week of intense grading is still ahead of me, but I do still find myself Twittering to keep myself sane as I read paper after paper after paper... As a matter of fact, I recently hit the 2500 post mark on Twitter. Perhaps Twitter is a fundamentally ephemeral medium, but I still like preserving things, at least as long as those things don't take up space in my basement. Twitter is set up in such a way that, even more than with blogs, old posts seem to disappear - they don't appear in Twitter searches after just a week or so and, as far as I can tell, the only way to view older ones is to open one's Twitter page and then continually click the "more" link at the bottom. (In other words, there's no easy way for me to go view my Twitter posts from June of 2009 except to click "more" again and again until I get there.)

So, I've made it a point to archive my "tweets" every now and then, and the 2500 mark seemed a good time to do that again. You can view them all in one page here. Of course, there are many bits of conversation that won't make much sense in retrospect, but all those "140 or fewer characters at a time" add up to about 45,000 words. It may take a little while for that page to load, but I think the "really long page" concept is greatly underappreciated on the web. I assume that long articles are often broken up across multiple pages so that sites can determine if readers are really clicking through to the end, but I'd always prefer to scroll and scroll. It's not like you're gonna run out of paper. This also makes it much easier to search an archive like what I've created. (As opposed to, say, the archive of #operaplot entries for 2010 which, sadly, are stretched across 12 pages - makes browsing that archive much less satisfying.)

If you should visit my Twitter archive, some of the fun terms to search (Ctrl-F on PC) would be: operaplot, composerfilms, palindrome, tomswifty, musicpickuplines, operacrostic, operagram, and, most fun of all, viola. Also, it you've never used Twitter, browsing the archive (and following some of the "in reply to" links) might be a useful way to get some idea of how it works. Though Twitter is still often derided as being nothing but obsession with minutiae, I think all of this really adds up to something.

Finally, here's a Wordle that I created from all of my Twittered text to date. I think it just, like, really doesn't make me look all that articulate, but the "just think like operaplot" and ''Thanks viola" groupings are nice:

Click the image to enlarge.

Wordle created at http://www.wordle.net/create

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