Archiving “tweets” using The Archivist

Let me begin by saying, if you are a Mac user, this post will not apply to you. Sorry. The Archivist is PC only at this point. If you’re on a Mac and interested in archiving your Tweets, I would suggest checking out “10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets” on the great ReadWriteWeb blog (ignore number 1.)

For the past couple of months, I have had the pleasure of archiving the incredible #edchat discussions on Twitter. It’s an amazing group of educators sharing ideas and experiences for a couple of hours a week using the Twitter hashtag #edchat.  Here’s how I do it using The Archivist.

Download The Archivist.

If you do not currently have .Net Frameworks version 3.5, you will see the following:

Once the installations are complete (.NET 3.5 can take a while), you’re ready to use the program.

Launch The Archivist:

The program is incredibly easy to use. Simply type in what you’re looking for in the “Search for” field and click on “Get Latest.” In the case of #edchat, I type in “#edchat” in the field.

You will then see the last 1500 tweets that contain your search term:

At this point, I could click on the Save button and save as an .xml file, but I want to make this publicly viewable inGoogle Docs, so I “Export to Excel.” The Archivist exports to a tab delimited .txt file. After opening this file in Excel, I remove the “id” field, which, I believe, is the id number of the tweet on Twitter (currently the id numbers are in the 5.7 BILLIONS.)

Once I’ve saved in Excel, I remove all of the tweets, with the exception of those for the particular #edchat session I’m archiving. I then sort the tweets in ascending order, so they appear in chronologically. After sorting them, I save the file as an Excel file (.xls) and upload to my Google Docs account. Once I’ve uploaded the file to Google Docs, I publish the file as a web page viewable by anyone.

After the document has been published, I send out a tweet using the #edchat hashtag announcing the address to the archive.

It’s that simple…

@web20classroom maintains a list of all of the #edchat archives in his Delicious account here.

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