Two political activists have gathered tweets from the Egyptian revolution and put them in a book called Tweets From Tahrir. It’s scheduled to be released April 21, a pretty quick turnaround for a book but maybe not so much for a book that the world already wrote for you. I spent a lot of time reading tweets from Egypt during the revolution there. I’m still reading a lot of tweets from Libya. They provide an oral history of what’s going on there, a multitude of voices forming a sort of Twitter mosaic.
Of course the real issue this presents is one of ownership. When you tweet something, is it still your copyright or have you released it to public domain. There’s widespread disagreement about this. Apparently the author/editors are trying to track down the tweeters for permission but come on. Are you really going to find hundreds of Egyptian protesters and have them give permission for something like this? Or are you going to publish it anyway and hope for the best?
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