Geeking out over the inauguration

Tuesday’s inauguration of President Barack Obama was utopia for geeks.

Sure, it was streaming online, but that’s been done since President Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration. (I know my inauguration trivia.) And it was big on Twitter, of course. But beyond that:

• whitehouse.gov was relaunched before the oath of office was stumbled over. See what the site looked like on Feb. 1, 2001, and compare to today. The new site has a blog, although comments are not open. (This administration is striving for transparency, right?) And third-party content is licensed under Creative Commons. With a new site, there’s also a new robots.txt file. (Compare it to the old one.) (h/t)
• It looks like there are two official Twitter accounts: @whitehouse_gov and @thewhitehouse. President George W. Bush also used @thewhitehouse; it has more followers. But it looks like both accounts rely on Twitterfeed.
• The swearing in ceremony was photographed by a remote camera for the first time.
• People really do look like ants in satellite photos. Photos were taken from 423 miles up from a satellite traveling 17,000 miles per hour during the inauguration. (And who knew what color the top of the U.S. Capitol was?)
• CNN tried a PhotoSynth to capture “the moment.” It doesn’t really capture a 3-D effect since photos really only came from one side of the inaugural stand. (Ryan Gladstone created a PhotoSynth for the Post-Dispatch last week on T. Rex Sue — it has more of a 3-D feel.)
• Lots of people got on the word cloud bandwagon. Of course, I’m still a big fan of my little project that lets you compare word clouds from two presidential speeches.

What else did you see?