Make Seriously | Design and Life

Some Really Awesome Tools to Commemorate the Inauguration

For those who aren’t keeping up to date, there are several cool visuals out there to help commemorate and share experiences from today’s historic inauguration. Regardless of your political sway, this is a huge moment in America’s history and in the advancement of civil rights. As such, people are doing all they can to share in the moment and to become a part of history. Their names won’t be in the books, but there is always the pride and joy of saying “I was there when America broke the racial barrier to the presidency”.

CNN is offering up Your View of History, which allows iReporters and laypeople to post their photos and reactions from their experience at the mall. Posters put their content at their viewpoint, and describe their experience from that point. There are definitely some great candid images and a lot of great visual descriptions of the emotional aspect of the event.

Even cooler, CNN is also offering the chance to rebuild The Moment using Photosynth. The short version: Live attendees post their images to the photosynth database, and it uses Microsofts crazy new technology to rebuild a 3D rendering of “the moment” of the inauguration. To get a good idea, here’s a moment and a description of the software. Reeeeeally cool stuff.

CNN is offering a third option for the tech savvy out there who can’t not check their facebook every five minutes: a live status update response to the events of the day as they unfold, without blinders to statuses across participating pages. In other words, you can see the updates without leaving facebook, without opening up your profile, and without the minor lunacy of message boards. I don’t have a link, but you can find it on their home page.

MSNBC is giving viewers a chance to brush up and compare Obama’s speech to others by offering the last 18 Inaugural speeches. Also pretty cool, and very informative. It’s interesting to see the approach each president has taken in his first address to the people, and then to look back at how they acted in office.

MSNBC also does an amazing job at allowing people to report their own reactions of the Inaugural by giving them the power to create their own clips. I’m pretty sure this is the web2.0 innovation of the day. It allows users to do what the news normally does, except without the need to be there with fancy equipment for capturing audio and video. It basically comes down to permission to make it what you will, and that’s a huge step for a media outlet like that.

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Even More Tweetness

Just when you may have started to think about using Twitter, let me give you one more reason: it’s an event organizing tool. What do you do to maintain order when you expect millions of people to show up at one location at one time? What do you do with ten thousand charter busses and ten times more people than there are spaces? If you’re the DC security staff working Obama’s inauguration, you’d use twitter.

And it’s pretty brilliant. It seems to me, in my infinite shuffle through new media articles, that Twitter has really been pushed as a “microblogging” tool; meaning you basically update your status so people can look at you and what you’re doing (as though they actually cared

The real power of a tool like Twitter comes from the creative organizational uses and the Obama security team understands this just like the Obama campaign team understood this. It streamlines communication lines. Instead of “trees”, you simply have a single text getting rerouted not just to other security members (which access can be limited to) but also to regular foot and vehicle traffic looking to navigate the soon to be packed-out DC streets. Where’s the traffic? Has there been a wreck? Are some lines not being used? Are there alternate routes? Twitter’s design allows for all of this information to be sent out immediately through a single channel of communication. Frankly, it’s brilliant.