People who are paying Twitter right now for access to Twitter Blue would be able to post the content of a weblog into a single tweet for the most part. Right now they are allowing some longer 4,000 word tweets to exist. Only the first 280 characters display in the feed, but the content exists on Twitter and could be displayed if somebody clicked on the Tweet. At one point, in the not so distant past that would have been a real measure of permanence. Something posted on Twitter could linger for years and even be read into the congressional record. Right now that reality has changed up a bit as the permanence of Twitter is less a resolute consideration of fact. Things are shaping up in ways that make Twitter as a company seem more ephemeral. At any moment, it’s entirely possible something that was valued at 44 billion dollars could be MySpace or Pets. 

My guess overall is that it will be more like Yahoo and something else will show up and claim the attention of the audience. Right now the supreme court is debating the very underpinning of the internet in terms of Section 230 of Title 47 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. That is perhaps the biggest potential change to how people communicate online since the advent of the internet as a mass communication platform. That is not hyperbole in any way shape or form. Removing Section 230 would change the way people utilize and interact with online platforms. Things may well get very interesting at some point in the not so distant future. It made me think a bit about what I should do with my online content shared on websites right now. That thought made me sit back and give permanence and the blog a bit more thought than it deserves. 

Right now my oldest musing can be found on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. For better or worse those musings were scraped and live on within that framework of online archiving. Currently, the bulk of my weblog is set to a private mode with 1,160 posts being walled off from easy access. Within that collection of walled off content are pretty much things that were written before 2014. I have considered retiring things older than a year, two years, and five years before as a natural cycle of my blog content. One of the things that happens or has happened so far is that I consider putting all that blog content into manuscript form and that idea makes me cringe. It would be a huge amount of work for a very limited payoff. To that end generally just thinking about taking that course of action is enough to stop me from ever really doing that. I’ll admit that a couple documents do exist with what would have been the corpus of content, but they never got edited. All that ended up happening was in my enthusiasm at that moment I started the process to backup the content. 

This blog is actually backed up in a couple different ways right now. Offline copies of the content are exported from WordPress and kept in a few locations. Right now the whole website and database are backed up and could be restored via a snapshot method. I’m confident that any actual effort to do a restoration would be difficult and ultimately frustrating. Every time the weblog itself has been lost before it was the images that were linked from posts were the part that ended up getting ultimately destroyed. Backing up words is easier than backing up the totality of the word, image, video, and formatting structure. 

It turned out that this blog post was not actually 4,000 characters long. I went over to Twitter to post it and the content counting well was not all the way full. My hope for this work this morning was to produce a completely full tweet. Ultimately, I was very close to achieving that goal without building out this last little bit of filler at the very end. If you got to this part of the content, then you probably get it and know just why this last little bit exists.