From @BrightEyedDyer who DMed me the breaking news and confirmed by both @LibraryCongress and USA Today comes an unexpected bit of news from Washington D.C. The Library of Congress has acquired Twitter archives dating back to 2006!

The Library of Congress go into details on their Facebook page, but USA Today reports the institution’s motivations in a nutshell:

The library notes that Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets a day and says its emphasis will be on the ”scholarly and research implications of the acquisition.”

Just a few examples of important tweets:

• The first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20)
• President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676)
• A set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).

Expect a deeper dive into this topic on the next Bird House Rules; but for now, think of all the goofy things you’ve said and done since you’ve been flying about the birdhouse…and now think “Hey, my tweets are heading for the Library of Congress!”

Don’t you dare change a thing in how you tweet. After all, it’s that unabashed honesty that got you (and the rest of us Twitterakians) into these hallowed halls!

More to come…

No, you’re not seeing things. I’m back, and I’m coming out of the Bird House swinging!

It’s been a long break, the first half of it expected and the other half completely unexpected; and I return to talk about foursquare, Please Rob Me, and the current concern sweeping through the Twitterverse. Adding to the debate of how much information is too much information comes FortheHack and their stand against sharing GPS coordinates for neat-o badges and free stuff from various vendors in the real world. Hear my own view of it from the Bird House and pick up a few twips in this episode on how to stay safe while sharing with your fellow Twitterakians.

Guest introduction by Starla Huchton

Featured movie and TV clips:

• Firefly
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
  
• Monty Pyhton’s “How Not to Be Seen” sketch
  
• Army of Darkness
  

Featured People and Stories:

• Security Expert Robert Siciliano
• Siciliano’s Twitter posting to CBS segment on “Please Rob Me”
• Siciliano’s tweet concerning “Please Rob Me”
• Exchange between me and Brand Gamblin
• Brightkite

Album Artwork by Paul Fischer of Dancing Cat Studios

Feel free to syndicate this audio, and provide feedback or topics you’d like to hear discussed on Bird House Rules at 703.791.1701, tmorris (at) imaginethatstudios (dot) com, Twitter, or here at the Bird House Rules Blog!

This morning, a lot of things were explained.

Maybe these hackers were partially responsible for yesterday’s intermittent service. Maybe the odd behavior from Twitter was merely a precursor for what PCWorld reported early this morning. Maybe I was the only one thinking about the DoS Attack from this summer, but Twitter was once again under fire. A group referring to themselves as The Iranian Cyber Army redirected for a brief time all Twitter traffic to a landing page of their design. Sumner Lemon of IDG News Service reports:

Visitors instead saw a black screen with an image of a green flag and Arabic writing. The defaced site also included a message that said, “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army,” and an e-mail address.

Twitter blamed the outage on changes made to the company’s DNS (Domain Name System) records, which match the company’s domain name with the IP addresses of its servers.

Meanwhile, the news from Twitter Status was that as of 11:28pm, last night:

Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.

So far, nothing new has really surfaced apart from critics who are saying this is just another show of how vulnerable Social Media sites are. I, for one, applaud Twitter’s resilience. They only lost service for an hour (which was probably when I was engrossed in my weekly dose of Mythbusters…) and managed to bounce back. Yesterday had been a somewhat uneven day for Twitter, but they have seen worse. Much worse. I think yesterday’s performance is proof extremely positive that Twitter has learned their lessons from previous growing pains.

So as the dust settles from yesterday, just remember…

…and tweet happy!

What’s the topic of the day at the Bird House? Inspired by an August 20, 2009 article entitled What People Are Tweeting About, the marketing magazine eMarketer and Pear Analytics took a closer look at the traffic on Twitter in order to answer the question “What is the purpose of Twitter?”

I ask the question “Does Twitter — or Social Media on a whole — need a purpose?”

Other articles cited in this episode:

“One Blog Created Every Second” (Aug 2, 2009), BBC News

Chris Brogan’s “Birds on a Wire”

Chris Abraham’s “All a Twitter is Twitter for Smarties”

Linda Vandevrede’s “Finally a Very Readable Book about Twitter” (for Valley PR Blog)

Guest introduction by Chris Lester

“That’s a fact, Jack!” from Stripes

Album Artwork by Paul Fischer of Dancing Cat Studios

Feel free to syndicate this audio, and provide feedback or topics you’d like to hear discussed on Bird House Rules at 703.791.1701, tmorris (at) imaginethatstudios (dot) com, Twitter, or here at the Bird House Rules Blog!

Welcome to Birdhouse Rules, the Official Podcast of All a Twitter and Sams Teach Yourself Twitter in Ten Minutes.

I promised that the show was going to post on a fortnightly schedule; but in light of recent events, I decided to shuffle the schedule around and make the first episode something timely. I wanted to talk about what happened on Twitter (and elsewhere) all day Thursday, August 6, 2009.

Just in case you missed it, you can hop over to the link I provide here in the show notes, but safe to say, it was a really busy day. It has taken Twitter a few days to recover. From the looks of things and according to the Status blog, there are still a few pieces needing to be picked up but Twitter — on a whole — is running smoothly.

This show was imspired not only by the events of last week but also by a comment left behind by our Guest Voice. Take a look at the blog, have a listen to this episode, and take a moment to send a “thank you” note to Twitter.com. They really managed to hold things together, and we should all be appreciative of their hard work for this free service they provide.

Guest introduction by Fred Castaneda

“All is Well” drop-in’s from National Lampoon’s Animal House.

Album Artwork by Paul Fischer of Dancing Cat Studios

Feel free to syndicate this audio, and provide feedback or topics you’d like to hear discussed on Bird House Rules at 703.791.1701, tmorris (at) imaginethatstudios (dot) com, Twitter, or here at the Bird House Rules Blog!

It all started this morning when, from Twitter Status, this nugget of good news arrived, explaining the odd, intermittent service:

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

For those of you (like me) who didn’t know what a Denial-of-Service or DoS Attack was at the beginning of the day, you probably know what it is now. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) defines a DoS Attack as the following:

In a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, an attacker attempts to prevent legitimate users from accessing information or services. By targeting your computer and its network connection, or the computers and network of the sites you are trying to use, an attacker may be able to prevent you from accessing email, web sites, online accounts (banking, etc.), or other services that rely on the affected computer.

The most common and obvious type of DoS attack occurs when an attacker “floods” a network with information. When you type a URL for a particular web site into your browser, you are sending a request to that site’s computer server to view the page. The server can only process a certain number of requests at once, so if an attacker overloads the server with requests, it can’t process your request. This is a “denial of service” because you can’t access that site.

This attack didn’t stop with Twitter, though, as Wired Magazine gave confirmation that Facebook was also under a DoS attack…

Facebook has confirmed to Wired.com that — like Twitter — it was the victim of a denial-of-service attack Thursday morning.

“Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” responded Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin via e-mail.

And now from several news sources, Epoch Times cited in this column, the popular blogging site LiveJournal is also being hammered and hammered hard…

Popular blog site LiveJournal also confirmed that it had been hit by a DoS attack. The company said that an attack had occurred at approximately 6 a.m. Pacific time.

The denial-of-service attacks are the latest in a round of such attacks. In July of this year, several websites run by the U.S. government, the New York Stock Exchange and websites in South Korea were taken down by similar attacks. While North Korea was suspected to be involved in those attacks, analysts have indicated in interviews with The Epoch Times that it was most likely the Chinese Communist Party helping North Koreans with the technology to launch the attacks.

In no way am I suggesting that the sky is falling, but I will give a bit of thought to what David Grizzly Smith asked me after my original posting on this morning’s assault on Twitter:

Given the whole thing with #iranelection, think the State Department will investigate the DDoS?

I’m hoping that someone up on Capitol Hill is paying attention. No, I don’t think this is Social Media’s 9-11, but something is most definitely afoot. This isn’t just a fluke happening. To hit Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal is impressive in a particularly scary way. It will be some time before the dust clears until we discover the responsible party behind these attacks, but right now we must all remain patient and (above all) calm. The creators and developers of these Social Media outlets are all working to keep their services online. I also have faith that other administrators to other popular sites are preparing for similar attacks. We, as the consumers, must keep our own heads about us and not flip out.

Today’s a weird, weird day…but consider this: Tomorrow’s Friday.

UPDATE

From the Twitter Status blog:

Thursday, 4:14 p.m. Site latency has continued to improve, however some web requests continue to fail. This means that some people may be unable to post or follow from the website.

From the blog comments, Aline sends in word from the New York Times that Google was also hit in the DoS onslaught. The article goes on to comment:

But Bill Woodcock, research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic, said the attack was an extension of the conflict between Russia and Georgia.

It was not clear who initiated the attack, Mr. Woodcock said, but it was likely that “one side put up propaganda, the other side figured this out and is attacking them.” He said he found evidence that the attacks had originated from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia.

Twitter is still a tag sluggish (although TweetDeck is running like a champ), but they are online and running. Remember, if your account starts acting squirrely, swing by Twitter Status and see what is going on back aboard the Mothership.

I also came up with an easier-to-circulate link, thanks to Bit.ly. Go to http://bit.ly/AllaTwitter and order your copy of All a Twitter today! And feel free to share this video across the blogosphere.

…then you have come to the right place. I’m still working on the details and dusting off the furniture; but in the meantime, tell a friend about All a Twitter and stay tuned for what’s coming soon from Tee Morris and Que Publishing.