Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Yesterday’s Record

Yesterday I watched one of the more than seven million video streams of the inauguration of Barack Obama. The documentation of this event must have set a new record for records:

The inauguration has been recorded and relayed in all kinds of ways, from Twitter, to Flickr, to Facebook status updates, to blog postings, to emails going back and forth—a lot of effort has been put into recording the events and emotions of the day. Much of that effort has been expended by citizens, not by journalists. Much of the recording has been done via mobile devices.
—“Changes over time
See also: “Day #1 of a new era …

Image: GeoEye-1, a satellite that supplies Google with high-resolution images of Earth.