The Inauguration Will Be Televised — and Tweeted and Flickr’d

The Inauguration Will Be Televised — and Tweeted and Flickr’d

By JENNA WORTHAM

Barack Obama’s inauguration will be televised. It will also be tweeted, live-streamed and simulated in virtual worlds.

This bodes well for those eager to participate in Tuesday’s festivities without risking frostbite or braving the troubling ratio of porta-potties available for the millions of political partygoers expected to descend on the nation’s capital.

Here at Bits, we’ve compiled a list of some of the inaugural happenings around the Web. Let us know which events we missed in the comments below.

Live Streams: The New York Times will be live-streaming Mr. Obama’s speech from its home page; video Web sites Hulu and Joost are among the other sites broadcasting Tuesday’s events.

Live Tweeting: Similar to its coverage of the presidential debates, Current TV is joining with the microblogging site Twitter to showcase inaugural day musings from the Twitter universe, in 140 characters or less. Beginning at 11:30 a.m. E.S.T., the indie media company will handpick selected messages, or “tweets,” and integrate the updates into the channel’s broadcast. To prevent network blackouts, Twitter’s chief executive, Biz Stone, told The Times that the company is doubling its capacity to gear up for the event.

Flickr: The photo-sharing social network, owned by Yahoo, will be hosting a respite from the packed event at a nearby wine bar. Local and visiting Flickeristas can drop in for a coffee or a glass of wine and check out photographs from election night alongside recently snapped images from the induction ceremony displayed in an exhibition of digital frames.

3-D Panorama: Microsoft is joining with CNN to release a digital panorama of the event using Photosynth, software that morphs a series of photographs into a digital, 3-D panorama. The company is soliciting professional photographs from news outlets as well as user-generated content, snapped from cellphones and digital cameras, for the final product.

DIY Inaugural Balls: Still waiting for an invite to one of Washington’s lavish parties to celebrate the new president? On the off-chance you don’t make it onto a V.I.P. list, you can still attend a party online. Gussy up your avatars and port them into one of the balls happening in Second Life and Wee World. If virtual alter egos aren’t your thing, try your luck finding a nearby shindig using the official Presidential Inaugural Committee’s handy Web tool.

Mobile Applications: UStream.tv, a streaming video site that lets anyone put up a broadcast, like the wriggling brood of Shiba Inu puppies that made headlines late last year. The company recently unveiled plans for an iPhone application that will port any of its streaming broadcasts to the Apple device -– including the inauguration. The service also supplements live streams with a chat function so Ustreamers can chit-chat during the festivities.

In the event that you are traveling to the nation’s capital for the event, the free 2009 Presidential Inauguration Guide iPhone application is a must-have for out-of-towners. The application serves up public transit schedules and details, locations of parking garages, free Wi-Fi zones and a Zagat guide for the Washington area. The nifty application will also map the current distance between the phone’s owner and the steps of the Capitol building.

For full article: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/the-inauguration-will-be-televised-and-twittered-streamed-flickrd/