How to Create a Twitter Archive

I’ve been trying to figure out how to create a lasting trail for a particular Tweetstream. In my case, what I want to do is to live-Tweet an event and have a record for posting to a site.

Thanks to Tom Martin for the Tweet that directed me to this post by Jason Baer. He live-Tweeted one of the panels at the South by Southwest Conference, then created an archive of it. Thanks, guys; this is great stuff and it absolutely resolves my issue!

What Jason did was:
• He live-Tweeted a panel at SXSW, giving it a unique hash tag, in his case #dellpanel

• When he saw a Tweet from someone else that he wanted to include, he retweeted it so it would be part of his Tweetstream.

• Then he went to Twitter Search and searched the combination of his hash tag and Twitter username #dellpanel from:jaybaer.

• That produced a complete log of his Twitter posts for the panel!

His original post is charming. People who don’t like something (like work!) often come up with clever ways to avoid it; in Jason’s case it’s having his hands full of stuff!

Whatever his motivation, he came up with a creative, productive use of Twitter. We’ll find more good uses for social media tools as time goes on.

In fact, you can’t look around for information without finding good, new applications. Now I’m off to read an article I found along the way about organizing a successful Tweetup event and start working on my own!