Today's concert at the Lincoln Memorial was moving. President elect Obama's speech inspiring. I watched it on a free glimpse of HBO (since revoked back to paying subscribers only). The excitement is rising. I attended a friend's party last night filled with out of town revelers who are planning to attend the frigid swearing in and a few Inauguration Balls to top it off. The energy at the party was high. At the Ward 4 house in Shepherd Park, they played Dr. King's "I Have a Dream Speech" on a loop into the street to greet all of us who came. The party went till 4am and the police came when they forgot to turn "off" Dr. King.
There are many ways to participate in the Inauguration via social media:
1. Use the hashtag #inaug09 on all of your tweets. I am certian that there will be others. This one comes from Kenneth Yeung who gives credit back to NPR's Andy Carvin (in our fair city).
2. You can see this hashtag feed via this Tweetscan
3. You can jump in with CNN via their Facebook partnership. It will lead you to an "event page" within Facebook which is essentially a promotion for the live coverage site found here. Sounds like they are planning on displaying the Facebook news feed (user's updates) adjacent to the video stream. Not sure this adds up to more than a "subscribe" outpost in Facebook but we'll. After all, CNN got an awesome write up for their digital leadership in news via the Sunday NYTimes today.
4. You can contribute to NPR's coverage of the event at their"Inauguration Hub". The idea there does seem to be to integrate your texts, tweets, videos and images via tags and the hastag mentioned above. They also seem to have an iPhone and Android app:
Download the iPhone app from the social networking section of the iPhone app store. For the Google phone, go to the Android Market and search for "IR09."
And a shortcode for texting:
Send a text message to 66937. Begin the message with the phrase #inaug09 or #dctrip09. You can include a ZIP code or one of the location tags in the sidebar.
You can follow along in their aggregate feed widget located here. Not sure how to download or embed it which is strange since it is formatted to look like an embeddable widget.
5. You can follow PBS's NewsHour Twitter updates here. While not strickly social, they also have a handy inauguration map here.
6. Or you can simply follow Obamathon Man's blog where he promises to attend and cover the Inauguration so you don't have to.
photo: thanks to earmuffboy of Flickr and his groovy CC license.
Hey thanks for giving me props on your blog. I appreciate it. But just so there's no confusion, I'm not the one who came up with #inaug09. Like you said, it all goes back to Andy Carvin and the folks at NPR. He really knows how to execute some good news/event social media campaigns.
Posted by: Ken Yeung | January 19, 2009 at 10:02 PM