There is a great short story by Jorge Luis Borges, called the Library of Babel, in which he describes a fantasy library, containing every possible book. Almost all the books are total gibberish, containing every possible combination of the letters of the alphabet, but a tantalising few contain snatches of meaning. And, logically, there must be a perfect copy of Hamlet in there somewhere, and also a copy where Hamlet is the murderer, or where he is abducted by aliens. Or anything. There must also be books which translate some of the gibberish books into sense. And so on.

It is easy to calculate how many possible books there are in Borges’ library. According to his scheme, he allowed only 22 lower case letters, a period, a comma and a space. Each book was 410 pages long, 40 lines per page, and 80 letters per line.

The answer is described in detail on wikipedia: it boils down to 25 to the power of 1,312,000. You can create one to look through here.

Which brings me to the point. How many possible tweets are there? If we follow Borges’ scheme, there are 25 to the power of 140 possible tweets. Of course, thanks to the miracle of Unicode, we have a lot more than 25 characters available to us. But lets keep things simple. Only a tiny fraction of these posts would make any kind of sense in any language.

Which got me wondering: how many of our tweets are actually unique? How many people have tweeted, for example, about eating a muffin at starbucks? And I thought it would be another fun twitter side project, to mark each non-unique tweet in some way, and to let you know if someone else has made exactly the same post before.

As the years pass, unique tweets would become rarer and rarer. As we posted, we would start expecting to find replicas of our droll little remarks: perhaps we would feel a little less special, or maybe pleasure at the feeling that we were not alone in the universe.

It would also answer the question of which tweet was the most common. My money is on ‘Too drukn to typee’.

I might be being very stupid, but it seems to me that there are some contradictions at work at the moment.

• A few days ago, several news organisations complained that Google News linking to their content reduced the value of their brand. Most people I know, follow or read felt that this was yet another example of how media organisations ‘don’t get the web’. 

• A few days ago, Merlin Mann of 43folders.com highlighted a tendency of AllThingsD to link to bloggers content without forewarning, and without making the ownership of that content sufficiently clear. (I think I got that right, read it here.) He makes the point that he is not after more page views – he is trying to build something of value, that he controls.

So, apart from news organisations being big, cumbersome, and doomed (the ‘baddies’ in the eyes of the accepted internet wisdom) and Merlin Mann being an individual, clever and funny (this guy’s GOT to be on our side, right?) what is the difference in their positions?

I genuinely don’t know who is right, and who is wrong. But they can’t both be right, or both be wrong.

Another example of double-think: Yesterday saw the launch of Twitshirt, which allows people to order custom made t-shirts, featuring any tweet you like enough to want to wear. No matter who wrote it. And they don’t ask your permission to use your intellectual property, you have to opt out. But, they do pay you 50c for every time someone uses your words, so everything is fine, apparently.

Mr Mann, whose tweets were (amazingly, from a common courtesy point-of-view) used in some publicity photos, did object however. Which is not surprising given his recent writings on this subject.

But. Isn’t this the way that YouTube works? People use upload copyrighted material, and if the owner objects, YouTube take it down, eventually. All of us internet citizens seem happy enough with that. So I can spend all day watching music videos on YouTube for free, and not that long ago the music companies were not making a penny out of it.

So, we want free music on YouTube, but we don’t want our tweets used without permission. We value our 140 character messages more highly than the accumulated lifetimes of creative output of thousands of musicians.

I don’t know if that is right or wrong either. But it worries me how we seem to accept that Google can trample all over some people’s output, and yet expect that we are somehow exempt from any fallout.

All of us blogging and tweeting are now producing content. Do we treat other people’s content with the respect that we expect ours to be treated with? If you see one of your tweets on a strangers t-shirt you might be flattered or appalled – but you might have some insight into how Rick Astley might feel about Rickrolling.

As long as we got stuff for free, we didn’t care where it came from or who owned it. The tidal wave of our popular opinion gave YouTube (Google) enormous power to decide what value something has, and how to present it. Now, as we produce our own content, we might start wanting some of those rights back.