Commercial: Digital history

There is a perennial lament, especially loud amongst those who have to reconstruct the past from paper documents, that the shift to digital culture is and will render their task almost nigh on impossible, from two broad perspectives:

1) The things that might have once been printed on paper won't be any more.
2) The volume of digital data is simply so huge that no sense can be made of it. Oh, and it's too ephemeral to be captured anyway.

To try and answer that last point, meet Twistory. Basically it plots your Twitter updates on a calendar, as so above.

It's not working properly for me, as far as I can see - it's not exported updates I was expecting it to, for starters. It's still enlightening, however, to see days in which I was more twitter active, and those I wasn't.

But still, it shows that, far from things being lost, more and more things are being locked into some sort of semi-permanent record. The trick is to move it into some other format before it disappears. Or it's forgotten about.

The wider stories? 1) Data, the collation, analysis, presentation and understanding of, is going to be more important in our lives; 2) Print's not dead, and is evolving.

But you knew all that already.