Did you miss the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama earlier today? Don’t worry, there are tons of resources online for you to check out. Here are some of my favorites, starting with this incredible image:
CNN was making a big deal out of this satellite image all day. Fortunately, BoingBoing posted a link to it this afternoon. Zoom in and check it out!
The most anticipated part of the day was probably President Obama’s Inaugural Address. The complete transcript is available here, and you can watch the video at CNN (or below).
Above is a word cloud of Obama’s speech, courtesy of ReadWriteWeb and Wordle.net. They compare it to the inaugural speeches of Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and Lincoln too.
Here’s the oath and inaugural address, courtesy of CSPAN:
You’ll notice the oath didn’t quite go as planned but Talking Points Memo points out that Obama didn’t mess it up, Roberts did:
Roberts started the oath. Obama went a little more quickly than he’d anticipated. And then in the second stage of the oath Roberts got the words wrong. Instead of "I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States" he said "I will execute the office of President of the United States faithfully …"
There was a moment of awkwardness, but they eventually sorted it out. The swearing in is just a formality anyway – Barack Obama became President at noon EST even before he had taken the oath (they were slightly behind schedule).
Here are some other great links:
- Interesting links continue to come in on Twitter – use this search to find them.
- CNN’s coverage is aggregated together here.
- There are thousands of photos up on Flickr.
- No surprise here: inauguration-related searches dominated Google Trends today.
- The New York Times posted a transcript of the inaugural poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander.
- Yahoo! News has a good list of inauguration hits and misses.
- Mashable has the statistics for CNN/Facebook – some truly impressive numbers.
- If you’ve got Silverlight installed, check out CNN’s The Moment. Very cool stuff.
- The White House website was updated right on time. Looks great so far! Here is what it looked like eight years ago.
- Twitter was pretty slow during the main event, but stayed up throughout it all – they saw 5x normal tweets-per-second and about 4x tweets-per-minute.
Know of any others? Let me know.
Finally it’s a reality – Barack Obama is President! Now the real work begins. I hope he’s ready.
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