But the tricky part of John's question remained:
- what about when the cited message (
cheats) actually spans several tweets? such as the 4 part Twitter message that John cobbled together for his readers but which we can hopefully see with a kwout:
So, the quote John "cobbled" was from the ?online periodical? titled Clay Shirky (cshirky) on Twitter.
Because the tweets are consecutive and all published on the same day at practically the same time could they be considered to be pages of that day's issue of that periodical? If so, remember that a 'page' specification would be cited in-text rather than in the reference.
Although Twitter posts are named with digits, they are not consecutive and they are large so using those digits as page numbers would be cumbersome and confusing to readers (eg /status/1362459269 ; 1362458547 ; 1362458174 ; 1362457866).
Could we use the date/time of publication as be a page reference? (with this I worry that the time/date we see at Twitter might depend on our timezone?)
(Shirky, 2009, Mar 20, 12:29pm-12-30pm)Shirky, C. [a.k.a cshirky] (2009, March 20). [4 tweets beginning: (1/4) The "Web vs. Print" ...] Clay Shirky (cshirky) on Twitter. Retrieved March 24, 2009 from http://twitter.com/cshirky
Is that time/date accurate for your viewing of Clay's Twittering? If not, could one include a timezone?
Although I'd understand that citation enough to find the source, I'd guess that it would not enter well into tools like Zotero, Endnote or Refworks.
Please, please, please... tell me how you would cite John's quote of Clay's tweets?
...aside...
In the process of this puzzling I tried out Gunther Eysenbach's suggestion commented on my citing-a-blog-post description about WebCite. I tested it: http://www.webcitation.org/5fWCODaYB but had the curious experience of having the collection of tweets disappear after 7 seconds, leaving only the background image.