The Social

Updated at 6:41 a.m. PST on Wednesday to update statistics from CNN and Akamai.

From what early numbers are indicating, the historic swearing-in of President Barack Obama was not the biggest traffic day for the Internet. But for many social networks and digital-media sites, Inauguration Day shattered traffic and usage records regardless.

Here are the ones we've heard from so far. We'll be updating this list as we hear more:

Akamai. The content delivery network has some numbers out that indicate traffic on the Web peaked right before noon Eastern time, with about 5.4 million visitors per minute flocking to online news outlets. While this is 22 percent above normal online news consumption, per Akamai, it's not a record. Obama's victory in November pulled in nearly 8.6 million visitors per minute, and the 7 million mark has been broken by both a hotly contested World Cup soccer game in 2006 and last year's March Madness college basketball playoffs.

Akamai said later on Tuesday that the inauguration did break an all-time record for the number of simultaneous video streams.

Visitors attempting to access CNN.com's live stream of the inaugural address got this message instead (Click image for larger view). CNN was just one of many Web sites that got overloaded during the speech.

(Credit: Screenshot by CBSNews.com)

CNN. It was a big day for the Time Warner-owned news outlet's Web site. It's been continually updating its statistics, but at press time, CNN.com said it has served more than 18.8 million live video streams, including 1.3 million at the same time right before Obama gave his address, since 6 a.m. EST. That's a record: Election Day served up only 5.3 million live streams. Apparently, it wasn't all smooth sailing, though. CBS News reports that CNN.com had a note posted for potential viewers who came to see the historic moment that said, "You made it! However, so did everyone else." (See screenshot at right.)

At 6 p.m. ET, CNN.com updated its statistics: There were over 160 million page views in a 12-hour span, along with 25 million live video streams--a new record for CNN, which had a previous high of 5.3 million live streams on Election Day. At peak, CNN estimates that it was serving 1.3 million simultaneous live streams.

Facebook. The social network, which partnered with CNN for a live feed of "status" updates (sort of like Facebook's equivalent of a Twitter post) pertaining to the inauguration, has put out some usage numbers and is still updating them. As of 10:15 a.m. PST, 600,000 status messages had been set using the CNN app, and an average of 4,000 Facebook status updates were set every minute during the inauguration. They peaked the minute Obama began his speech, with 8,500 status messages set in those 60 seconds. "Millions" of members logged into the social network during the live broadcast.

Mogulus. The live-streaming service powered online inauguration video streams for C-Span, USA Today, and other newspapers owned by USA Today publisher Gannett (which has a minority stake in the company). Inauguration coverage broke Mogulus' network record, according to early numbers, with 105,000 concurrent viewers and more than 1 million visitors total.

Hulu. The video hub, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., declined to provide any viewership statistics for Inauguration Day.

Our colleagues at CBSNews.com report that they, too, ran into trouble with their live stream of the inauguration speech, saying that many people could not load the stream around the time of the address due to overwhelming demand.

Twitter. Co-founder Biz Stone put up a blog post after the craziness had died down on Tuesday, saying that the rate of "tweets" (Twitter messages) per second hit as much as five times the normal rate, and that the rate of tweets per minute hit four times the normal rate. He acknowledged, though, that there was a lag time of two to five minutes for many users. The good news? Twitter, once highly outage-prone, didn't crash entirely.

The New York Times. No official numbers have been released, but a representative for the newspaper's NYTimes.com division said that early data indicates the live stream of the inauguration pulled in a record number of viewers compared to all the live video it's ever run. Not surprising.

Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, which also publishes CBSNews.com.

NEW YORK--Solar panels clusters in New Mexico, wind farms dotting the Great Plains? That's all very nice. But that railroad tunnel in Baltimore is important, too.

On a gray and rainy Thursday, I went to Time Inc.'s midtown Manhattan headquarters for what was supposed to be a panel about the company's flagship magazine's annual "Person of the Year" honor. But amid consistently grave economic news, not to mention the fact that everyone in attendance seemed to agree that President-elect Barack Obama eclipses any other options for the award, the conversation was less about a magazine headline and more about the future of the country.

After a hefty fall season of digital-media and Web conferences, I was surprised to witness that outside the culture of think-big tech pundits, "the future" is a lot more mundane.

"This is what President Obama's going to face," said panelist Elizabeth Edwards, Center for American Progress senior fellow and wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards. The road out of the economic crisis is "not a refund check" encouraging more consumption, "not more houses with more flat-screen TVs...(but) bridges that work and schools that inspire students."

The panelist lineup was impressive: in addition to Edwards, there was NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams; Mad Men actor John Slattery; personal-finance talking head Suze Orman; Saturday Night Live head writer Seth Meyers; and congressional Rep. Artur Davis (D-Alabama). None of them were the sorts of people whom I'd seen onstage in the past two months of tech industry events, from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York to the Future of Web Apps in London to last week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco (which featured Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former Vice President Al Gore, among others).

To be sure, the Techmeme set talks a whole lot about recession and recovery these days. Al Gore has urged us to move beyond "the gee-whiz stuff." Back in April, Tim O'Reilly expressed mild disgust at the fact that some of the U.S.' best and sharpest minds were busy building new ways to throw virtual hamburgers at each other on Facebook.

The problem is that some of these digital thought leaders' "real-world solutions" are still painted with that wide-eyed, change-the-world Valley sparkle. There is a distinct soldier-on, innovation-won't stop attitude, even as dozens of tech companies slice off a fifth, a quarter, a third of their workforces. Tech innovation will change the world in big ways, but it will change the world in small and unglamorous ways, too, and we're not hearing a whole lot of that.

At the Web 2.0 Summit, Gore suggested that in ten years we can build a "unified national smart grid" of sustainable electricity, a plan that would create thousands of jobs but which critics say might not even work. Paul Otellini excitedly showed off an Intel prototype of a camera-like gadget that could do language translations in seconds. Other panels at the same conference were all about consumer solar equipment retail, home DNA tests, and $100,000 electric sports cars.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams

(Credit: NBC)

There was none of that on Thursday at Time Inc.'s headquarters. Williams suggested that perhaps President Obama's priorities should, FDR-style, putting people to work repairing a national infrastructure that's in bad disrepair. "Would it be that bad if we had a big jobs program?" Williams posed.

He asked why New York's LaGuardia Airport is in disrepair, why some of the city's infrastructure hasn't been touched since the days of controversial public works czar Robert Moses, and why it was possible that a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis last year. He asked why the U.S.' only high-speed train line, Amtrak's Acela Express, has to slow to 25 miles per hour to get through a tunnel outside Baltimore that dates back to the 1930s.

If people were put to work repairing it, Williams said, "you could get to Washington 20 minutes earlier."

The nifty smart-camera gadget that Otellini showed off at the Web 2.0 Summit might as well have been a flying car on The Jetsons in comparison.

It was a marathon evening for media buffs as Barack Obama beat rival John McCain to become the United States' first African-American president-elect. You couldn't miss it on Twitter, as the microblogging service exploded with election updates, commentary, and speculation.

Miraculously, Twitter's servers lasted the night, and had quite a lot of terrific, 140-characters-long election commentary (in messages known as "tweets") to serve up for hungry news hounds. Here are 10 of CNET News' favorites.

10. One of Barack Obama's most-buzzed campaign innovations was announcing his running mate choice via text message. It not only bolstered the young candidate's image as the nominee of choice for tech-savvy youth, but it also gave his campaign a huge repository of cell phone numbers--and nobody was surprised when Obama used them on Election Day. It even got on some users' nerves: Twitter user FinanceGirl expressed her frustration: OMG, Obama! Please stop texting me!

9. In the interest of shameless self-promotion, this one comes from CNET News' own Josh Lowensohn, who asked at the conclusion of Obama's music-filled victory speech, This remind anyone else of the end of Return of the Jedi? With CNN using holograms to bring remote correspondents into the studio, Princess Leia-style, he's got a point.

8. If you were following the election feed on Twitter during Obama's acceptance speech, at one point, the conversation turned entirely to puppies. Backstory: Obama had promised his two young daughters that he'd give them a puppy if he won the election, and as he thanked his family in the speech, he mentioned that, yes, they'd get the dog. From the twittering masses came plenty of OMGs and adorable-speak, but Twitter user Dennis Yang had a different thought in mind: obama, do I get a puppy too?

7. Los Angeles-based twitterer Bill Palmer noticed that literally everyone caught election fever: homeless guy on Hollywood Blvd with a sign that says "Obama aint the only one who wants change"--now that's clever. McCain supporters, insert your own potshot about "spreading the wealth around" here.

(Credit: Twitter; The Onion)

6. One of the funniest Twitter accounts to follow during the election was the account for satire newspaper The Onion, and it was in high gear. Members of Twitter were encouraged to tag their tweets with #twitvote to provide election updates; The Onion naturally started planting fake ones. The best of the bunch: #twitvote 9:39 a.m. Dr. Monopoly Pumpernickel was denied a vote after he was shown to be nothing more than 3 small children in an overcoat.

5. Another pretty sweet tweet from The Onion: #twitvote: 5:57 p.m. Donald Pauley of Pickerington, OH fled the polling station when his voting machine asked, "Shall we play a game?"

4. As voting lines reached record lengths around the country, CrunchGear blogger Peter Ha told everyone via Twitter to calm down: If you can wait three+ days to buy a damned iPhone then you can wait (in) line to vote, a**hats. Crude, yes. But he gets his point across.

(Credit: Twitter; jdmcleodjr)

3. One of the biggest success stories of the election cycle--you know, besides the guy who won--was FiveThirtyEight.com and its owner, Nate Silver. The election prediction site sprang up out of Silver's experience predicting baseball results, and twitterers were in awe when FiveThirtyEight's predictions turned out to be almost completely dead-on.

Twitter user jdmcleodjr has some ideas for what he should do next: Incidentally, Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com ought to take his act to Vegas. Well, if you've mastered baseball and national politics, there must be only one frontier left to conquer--poker!

2. It was a thrilling evening for Obama supporters, but some people have really been left out in the cold--namely late-night talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians who have said in the past that the now-president-elect simply isn't wacky enough for joke fodder.

Remember how thrilled comedians were when he learned that Obama was bad at bowling? They'll have to be more creative now, as Canadian comedian Peter Cianfarini twittered: Do you people have any idea how much more difficult you've made it for comedians? We needed McCain & Palin. I hope you're all proud! Defeated veep candidate Sarah Palin, after all, will be associated with Canadian comedy for years to come.

1. And our official "best election tweet" award goes to Twitter user JHix, who wrote about his voting experience: Officially just played the worst video game ever. You mark people with an "x" and then wait almost forever to find out who won.

Let's say Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama sent every one of those "here's my V.P." text messages from his own cell phone. And let's say his mean, nasty carrier charged him 10 cents for each one. According to Nielsen's numbers, his bill would've been $290,000--that's because the statistics firm says that the SMS campaign stunt reached 2.9 million people.

The company's Nielsen Mobile division did the math, monitoring approximately 40,000 SMS short-code lines in the U.S. and coming up with the final tally of 2.9 million.

"The VP message was sent in the late hours of Friday night and is, by many accounts, the single largest mobile marketing event in the U.S. to date," a release from Nielsen read. The initiative has been moderately criticized because it ultimately didn't work: the press reported that Obama had chosen Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential pick before anyone had had the chance to hit the "send" button on that fateful text message.

But Nielsen says that doesn't matter.

"While much has been said of the timing and the scoop by news outlets, Obama's V.P. text-message still ranks as one of the most important text messages even sent and one of the most successful brand engagements using mobile media," Nielsen's report read, adding that an estimated 116 million American use text messaging actively.

"The value of the message goes far beyond the 26 words and 2.9 million recipients. Here, Obama branded himself as cutting edge, inflated the already enormous press attention paid to his V.P. pick and further established a list of supporters' most coveted form of contact: their cell phone numbers."

In one of his recent--and subsequently parodied--attack ads on U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, Republican John McCain accused his rival of being too much of a celebrity and not enough of a political leader.

That was what I first thought of upon learning that the Obama campaign has instituted text-message alerts to inform supporters of the candidate's choice for vice presidential running mate.

So this way, if you're OMG OMG TOTALLY DESPERATE to learn whom Obama has chosen for his veep, you can sign up and learn the moment it's announced--even before anybody Twitters it. The timing seems a little bit awkward, considering the whole Paris Hilton ad debacle. Text-message alerts for Obama's vice president assumes the sort of eager anticipation generally reserved for the second or two of Best Picture envelope-opening at the Oscars, or the naming of the Brangelina brood's latest member. You know, celebrity.

On the other hand, this could net the Obama campaign quite a few more e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers for its Rolodex of supporters. And text message initiative like this is an appeal to the Britney generation, the hordes of young supporters who have grown up drinking a highly caffeinated blend of AIM and the E! network, and who don't see the slightest problem with applying the rhetoric and strategy of celebrity infatuation to national politics. That's the crowd who made Obama into a "celebrity."

And, come to think about it, if TMZ-inspired campaigning has reinvigorated public interest in the nation's future, I don't see anything wrong with that. But I'll pass on the text message, Barack. I can wait until it shows up on Google News.

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama appears in cartoon form on the logo of Chinese search engine Baidu.

(Credit: Baidu)

Chinese-language search engine Baidu has an unusual new mascot atop its home page: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

A cartoon version of Obama is depicted next to a donkey, the Democratic party emblem. He's holding a net as though casting it, and attached to the end of the net is a computer mouse--get it? It's the Internet.

This is part of a "person of the month" feature that Baidu has instituted since November, the blog Shanghaiist explains. Each month, Baidu selects a real-life or fictional personality who has ranked high in its search queries. As Shanghaiist explains, it's "a bit like Google Trends meets Time Person of the Year on a monthly basis." Barack Obama is the sixth installment in the series.

The series is hosted on the domain renwu.baidu.com; "renwu" means "historically important person."

While the biography of Obama on Baidu is largely celebratory, this is not a formal endorsement of the candidate. It is, however, an endorsement of his Web-savviness. Clicking on the Obama-adorned logo on Baidu redirects to a Chinese-language biography of the candidate and links to various media; the central talking point is Obama's status as a young politician who has successfully leveraged digital media and the Web to rise to fame. Of particular note, according to his Baidu page, is his speech about race in Philadelphia that soared to the YouTube stratosphere after appearing on television earlier.

But of more local relevance, the Baidu site about Obama also highlights the high volume of Chinese search queries for both Obama and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Charts and graphs detail politics-related searches both Chinese and international. There are also information resources pertaining to what the U.S. presidential election means to China, and what Chinese citizens think about it.

"State and world affairs have become the most popular topics of concern for Internet users," a translation of part of Baidu's page about Obama reads. It doesn't seem to mesh particularly well with the Chinese government's rigid stance on the spread of information, particularly political rhetoric, on the Web.

Nor was it clear whether the Obama campaign would react positively, considering the tense relationship between the U.S. and China. Calls to the campaign's press office for comment were not immediately returned.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

NEW YORK--When it comes to a strategy for galvanizing young voters in the hours before the "Super Tuesday" primaries, a coalition of big-media outlets chose to throw an online and offline dialogue with candidates. A group of tech-friendly 20-somethings in New York decided the best way to organize young supporters of Democratic candidate Barack Obama would be to invite them to a massive dance party.

Over the past week, invitations created through Facebook and Evite flew around the inboxes of many plugged-in young New Yorkers: an appropriate donation to Obama for America would give them access to an open bar, dance-worthy DJ music, and plenty of other young Obama fans who were willing to spend Saturday night at a fundraiser rather than a Lower East Side hotspot. The informal Web invites appear to have been a success, as several hundred people showed up--and most of the attendees, who were overwhelmingly under the age of 30 (and almost exclusively under 35) were indeed dressed up for a Saturday night out. Campaign T-shirts were almost nowhere to be found, except on one young woman sporting a shirt that said "I've Got A Crush On Obama" with plenty of pink hearts.

But the event wasn't just a bunch of kids; the "Big Obama Party" had close ties to the local technology and digital-media communities. The organizers had no formal affiliation, but several count progressive Web policy initiatives like Free Culture and Creative Commons, as well as New York University's art-meets-tech Interactive Telecommunications Program among the points on their resumes.

And the venue was Web video studio For Your Imagination, which has become a local favorite among the dotcom set due to the company's courageous willingness to host late-night parties in its office space.

The crowd wasn't quite as "dotcommy" as an event for, say, geek candidate-of-choice Ron Paul might be. It was, however, a clearly creative and tech-savvy set. There were more than a few bloggers in the house, including at least one from TechCrunch's payroll. Others were into the more experimental, Improv Everywhere-esque side of culture: one young choreographer told me that he was working on a "Boogie for Obama" in which dancers in Obama T-shirts would get their freak on in the New York subways on the day before Super Tuesday.

Throwing a Saturday night dance party for young voters as a political fundraiser, especially in a city where there are gossip-hungry bloggers on every corner (ahem), always runs the risk of turning into bad press. But there was only one moment when the event nearly erupted into scandal--when somebody decided to take Obama's "fired up and ready to go" slogan a little too literally and, well, fired up a joint. Regardless of what you think about marijuana legalization, it's still illegal in the state of New York and caused some concern among For Your Imagination representatives, whose landlords are undoubtedly being very generous by permitting them to hold open-bar parties. The offending joint was extinguished, but the dance floor energy wasn't.

Yes, that's right: people actually danced. Whether they'll actually vote--we'll see on Tuesday.

Iowa what?

Amid the frenzied press coverage over Thursday's too-close-to-call caucuses in the Hawkeye State, 153,226 MySpace.com users have already cast their (unofficial) votes.

In a set of "virtual primaries" held on Tuesday and Wednesday, Republican Rep. Ron Paul and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama were declared the winners of the News Corp.-owned social-networking site's polls.

The poll was conducted entirely through MySpace's Impact political site. And for those who have been following Election 2008 on the Web, neither "victory" is particularly surprising.

On the Democratic side, MySpace users selected Obama nearly 2 to 1, with the Illinois senator taking 46 percent of the vote, followed by Hillary Clinton with 31 percent and then John Edwards with 8 percent. Obama's triumph among MySpace's young and tech-savvy user base is no surprise--he has proven a favorite among many young voters hoping for change, as well as a sizable portion of left-leaning geeks.

But in Thursday's Iowa caucuses, Obama doesn't enjoy such a clear advantage--the outcome remains too close to tell.

Ron Paul, however, is a different story. The Texas congressman is considered quite the long shot, failing to poll above more than a few percentage points nationwide. But his libertarian views and vocal opposition to the war in Iraq have found a welcome home on the Web, and MySpace is no exception. In the social network's virtual primaries, Paul won by an impressive margin with 37 percent of the vote, followed by more legitimate offline contenders Rudy Giuliani (18 percent) and Mike Huckabee (16 percent).

"Exit poll" questions in the MySpace primary revealed that 83 percent of participants plan to vote in their states' actual primaries, and 91 percent plan to vote in the general U.S. election. They also named the economy and jobs, the war in Iraq, and health care to be the three most important issues facing the country.

Representatives from the social network, which has launched an extensive youth-voting initiative and political awareness campaigns for the 2008 election, have stressed that the results of the primary represent the "MySpace generation," and consequently probably don't reflect the nation as a whole.

Additionally, it should be noted that while the poll was offered only to members of MySpace's main U.S. site (not its international editions), it did not require respondents to be of legal voting age. And while MySpace has said the average age of respondents is 29 years old, such a figure should be taken with a grain of salt because no age verification system was in place.

But when it comes to the political leanings of avid social network users, MySpace's results may not be far off base. Rival social network Facebook has also launched a politics site in conjunction with ABC News, and ongoing presidential-candidate polls show Obama and Paul as the front-runners there too.

(Credit: LinkedIn (Screenshot by Switched))

Plenty of coverage has been devoted to national politicians' widespread adoption of MySpace and Facebook as campaign tools--it's a popular strategic move to ride the wave of viral buzz and simultaneously cater to the elusive youth vote. Democratic candidate John Edwards was even a Twitter early adopter.

Business-oriented social-networking site LinkedIn, meanwhile, has stayed out of the political fray. And indeed, LinkedIn hasn't started any formal campaign tie-ins the way MySpace has. But that hasn't stopped presidential hopeful Barack Obama from creating a profile on the site; if you want to "add him as a connection," you can do so right here.

At the very least, it's kind of amusing to see Obama's credentials and goals fit into the rigid confines of a LinkedIn profile. You can see the Illinois senator's past political experience (as many pundits have repeatedly emphasized, it's a short list) laid out like a resume, and learn that his non-professional interests include "basketball, writing, and spending time with (his) kids." And, of course, there's the "Get Introduced to Barack Obama" link. Sure, maybe at a $500-a-plate dinner.

(Via Switched)