President Barack Obama was still standing on the steps of the Capitol Building when the clocks struck 12:01 p.m. in Washington Tuesday, ushering in his presidency. At that very moment, his administration took control of the White House and its official website, kicking off a new digital age for the U.S. government.
"Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the Internet to play a role in shaping our country's future," Macon Phillips, director of new media for the White House, wrote in the site's first official blog post.
The site "will serve as a place for the president and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world," Phillips wrote.
Just as Obama's campaign used the Internet in new ways to organize supporters and raise funds, millions of onlookers turned to social networks and other online tools to soak up every last iota of detail of the 44th President's inauguration ceremony.
When George W. Bush took his second oath of office in 2005, social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook were in their infancy, populated mostly by teenagers and college students. Although some media outlets streamed the proceedings through their websites, the results were unsatisfying and sparse.
The world watched yesterday as the first true Internet inauguration unfolded.
As Obama began his speech, 12 million people were accessing news content every second, according to Akamai Technologies, a U.S. firm that helps media companies meet visitor demand on their websites.
Akamai noted that worldwide Internet traffic spiked to levels 54 percent above normal -- 60 percent higher in North America -- as the inauguration kicked off.
CNN reported that nearly 14 million people tuned in to the proceedings through its live Web video feed, easily topping its previous record of 5.3 million hits set on election night in November.
Through an integration deal with Facebook, CNN also allowed users to update their status through the news channel's site as they watched events in Washington.
An average of 4,000 users updated their status every minute, with more than 8,500 posting new updates the minute Obama began his speech. In total, Facebook reported 1.5 million status updates through the CNN portal alone.
Obama's official Facebook fan page received a deluge of visitors, pushing the number of fans on his profile to more than 4 million and swelling the comment section to more than half a million posts. His MySpace page now features more than one million "friends."
By last night, more than 40,000 photos of the events on Capitol Hill tagged with the word "inauguration" were posted to Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing site, Flickr.
Twitter -- which didn't even exist the last time a president was sworn in -- experienced a flurry of activity as millions of users in Washington and around the world posted their thoughts on the inauguration. A post on the company's website said the micro-blogging service saw five times the average number of messages posted every second, causing a delay of up to five minutes at times.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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