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The above is the beginning of twistory, the first tweet in the #HowBlackAreYou meme.

On Wednesday July 29th, shortly after 7am ET, I was feeling particularly black. I felt the need to share this with fellow comedian, new yorker and smart black man, Elon James White (@elonjames or www.twib.me). Thus began, #HowBlackAreYou

Elon responded to me: "Challenge, son?" because he loves the word "son" because he's from Brooklyn and never ever fails to remind anyone of that fact. I threw it down. He picked it up. Back and forth we went, and others joined.

Twelve hours later, I counted 851 tweets tagged #HowBlackAreYou. This isn't showing up on Twitter trending topics or on hashtags.org (because they are clearly very racist like our President), but we know the truth.

I've gathered a few ways for folks to look through the archive below, but what I need is a tool to find, archive or sort all the #HowBlackAreYou tweets in chronological order. Please share if you know of some.

Twitter search: http://bit.ly/howblackareyoulive

...dies after a few days or weeks, and it shows in reverse chrono, so it's hard to walk back to the first tweet because that page is always changing. This works for the most recent, but is not good for analysis.

Hashtags.org - http://hashtags.org/tag/howblackareyou

...uses some sort of sampling method. I'm not clear on where it gets its numbers or how, but it does not reflect my manual count of tweets and barely registers on the big board

FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com/howblackareyou

...I set up this room to capture the RSS feed of the twitter search for #howblackareyou. Unfortunately, I didn't start this until three or four hours after we kicked off the meme, so the origins are not in this archive.

FInally, here are some manual links to the first 10 original tweets (non retweets). I just like to see the origins of the snowball.

#1. baratunde http://twitter.com/baratunde/statuses/2908071691
#2. elon http://twitter.com/elonjames/statuses/2908087941
#3. elon http://twitter.com/elonjames/statuses/2908104642
#4. baratunde http://twitter.com/baratunde/statuses/2908133802
#5. elon http://twitter.com/elonjames/statuses/2908187997
#6. hbeeinc http://twitter.com/hbeeinc/statuses/2908220761
#7. baratunde http://twitter.com/baratunde/statuses/2908223841
#8. elon http://twitter.com/elonjames/statuses/2908255068
#9. realdawnsummers http://twitter.com/realdawnsummers/statuses/2908263486
#10. baratunde http://twitter.com/baratunde/statuses/2908294662

Again, if anyone knows of or is willing to build a tool that displays the history of a twitter search in chronological order, hit me up. Bonus if the tool allows folks to search that history, mark tweets as favorite and retweet or otherwise share those from the tool's interface.

Now I'm going out to dinner in Bath, Maine for some lobster because I that's how black I am.

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