Move over holographic reporting! With Obama's inauguration coming up tomorrow, many news organizations are experimenting with innovative ways to address the event. Here's a short list:
In tomorrow's issue of the Guardian G2, a number of acclaimed designers and illustrators will reimagine select excerpts from Obama's previous speeches. Click the link to CR Blog above for a quick preview.
In an effort to "...capture the most detailed experience of a single moment ever," CNN will assemble photos sent in by users into one epic photosynth. Almost every major news source seems to be inviting photo submissions from attendees, but CNN are clearly trying to put themselves ahead of the pack by assembling them all into 3D.
These two projects from the talented interactive team at the NY Times illustrate the public's future aspirations for the presidency and the vocabulary used in inaugural speeches. Over 200 people shared their hopes for the Obama presidency in interviews conducted for I Hope So Too, a section that groups these recordings by theme. Visitors can agree with the statements made, or alternately offer up their own hopes, it theirs aren't represented. Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present depicts, in a tag cloud for each president, the most-used words from previous inaugural addresses.
The only non-news organization on this list, the company behind the GeoEye-1 satellite, which generates images for Google Maps and Google Earth, will cover the Inauguration by dispatching aerial images of the U.S. Capitol tomorrow.
Perhaps the most low-fi of the bunch, Meetup.com and the Huffington Post will handout half a million name tags reading "Hello, My Fellow American, My Name Is" to inauguration attendees in hopes that the stickers will spark up conversation, IRL-style.
related (and an interesting study in meme remixology):
http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/