Blog #3 - The Week of April 1st

Greetings Post-Spring Break! I’m back at it again after a week off in Chicago with some friends! My internship continues to go smoothly as I continue to research possible customers for Innocuous and to do marketing for them as well. I’m learning a lot about how to properly reach out to potential customers while learning what gets a click on a post.

With my research, things are moving along smoothly! I started looking through the wayback machine for viewership data for the Washington Post Shorts’ account on tiktok. Unfortunately, there was no data for their youtube account, and their instagram has interestingly disappeared off the web. While I can find evidence that they had an instagram at some point, it’s not available anymore, so I’m working purely off of their tiktok for now.

Another hiccup that I’m running into is with the Wayback machine itself. Due to how the wayback machine likes to analyze and store its data, it really struggles with websites that aren’t HTML based, meaning that the tiktok website is something it can struggle to load. Several of the snapshots are unloadable, leading to just a blank screen, and some of them were flagged by the website itself noting that the website redirected them. I have found two reasons for this. One being that there was an iteration of the tiktok website where you had to log in to view content, which the Wayback Machine is obviously incapable of doing. The second reason being that the tiktok servers sometimes get a little confused themselves. With most of the snapshots, the wayback machine copied enough of the server data so that it could load the basic account information (ie. followers, total views, following, channel notes), but sometimes it doesn’t do that, leading to the website trying to use the tiktok servers, which obviously can’t work because the server time and the time the wayback machine is trying to load to match, leading to the wayback machine crashing unfortunately. This means that there are chunks of data that are just unavailable and there’s nothing I can really do about it unfortunately. However, on the brighter side, I do believe I have enough intact data to continue with this path for now.

Within the next week I hope to have collected all of the Wayback machine data. Right now, I’m somewhere around mid 2022, with 2019-2021 already fully cataloged, so that seems like an achievable goal by this week. Next week will be source searching online through JSTOR and other similar databases alongside actually analyzing all the data that I’ve collected to start formulating my research paper.