I recently described some Some Use Cases For Preserving Twitter Posts including preservation of an organisation’s digital memory and preservation of data for subsequent data mining. The post, however, failed to include perhaps the most obvious example: preservation of Twitter posts (tweets) related to an event.

In response to that post a number of solutions for preserving tweets were suggested including FriendFeed, the WordPress Lifestream plugin and What the Hashtag. In addition following a tweet I posted I received details of the Tweetdoc service.

With this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2009) rapidly approaching it is timely to decide the tools we’ll be using to preserve the discussions associated with this event. We began keeping a record of the amplification of the IWMW event back in 2005 when an IRC channel was provided for use by the small numbers of participants who had a laptop and WiFi connectivity at the event. The IWMW 2005 event took place during the 7/7 bombings in London and a record of the awareness of what was having can be gleaned from the archive of the IRC discussions.

This year we will once again be making use of Twitter and will be capturing tweets which contain the event hashtag #iwmw2009.  The tools we are currently intending to use are What the Hashtag and Tweetdoc service.

Use of What the Hashtag to views tweets containing the #iwmw2009 tag is illustrated.

As can be seen the output can be access as an RSS feed. In addition the data can be viewed as an HTML resource, and a data range can also be supplied.

We intend to capture this tweets about the IWMW 2009 event after the event is over, and store the data on the UKOLN Web site, in order to avoid dependencies on the What the Hashtag service itself.

We will also explore other services, such as Tweetdoc - although in this case as the data is only available as a PDF resource, it is not well-suited to provide data for analysis by other services.

Are there any other services we should be looking at? And what functionality might be desirable for a more generic service for preserving tweet? Any thoughts?

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Note: This blog post has been written to support a poster which will be provided for the Missing links: the enduring web conference. The poster, which has been produced by Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly, UKOLN, is entitled “Preservation Policies and Approaches for Use of Web 2.0 Services“. A series of blog posts published on this blog provide more detailed information of the content summarised in the poster.