Barack Obama’s inauguration on Twitter

Barack Obama's inauguration will be the first of a US president to be followed on Twitter, the micro-blogging site whose potential for 'citizen journalism' and disseminating information at lightning speed has aroused huge excitement on the web.

A map showing Twitter messages and photos and where they were published
A map showing Twitter messages and photos and where they were published

The way tens of thousands of people first learnt of last week's US Airways crash in New York via Twitter has only whetted appetites for its likely role today.

Barack Obama has his own Twitter profile, which has been quiet since his election but there is also an official inauguration profile .

The easiest way to follow what people are saying about the inauguration is to search for all messages, or “tweets”, that have the same label. The labels, called hash tags, that are being used for the inauguration are #inaug09, #obamainaug, and #inauguration. You can search for hash tags at http://search.twitter.com.

January the 20th is an online project documenting inauguration day and takes its inspiration from Mass Observation, which asked 200 Britons to record their experiences of the coronation of King George VI in 1937. You can follow the 2009 project with the hash tag #jan20th.

Aggregators are also collecting inauguration tweets to make them easier to find. Tweetgrid is gathering three simultaneous streams of inauguration tweets. If that is too much to take in, Tweet The Inauguration is much simpler.

Alternatively, this site plots tweets and photos uploaded to Flickr onto a map showing where in the world they were published.

Twitter users will also be posting pictures to TwitPic. However, since you cannot search TwitPic it is much easier to find photos using Flickr’s Inauguration group. Also look out for links to video clips posted to Qik, Seesmic and Phreadz.

You do not need to be a member of Twitter in order to see other people’s tweets but it is much easier if you have an account. There is a guide for getting started on Twitter here.