Admission time:  I was excited about Tuesday’s inauguration.   Putting all politics aside, it was exciting to see all the people in Washington DC.    On their faces, I saw a sense of hope and history that I wanted all my students to share in.   So, on  Tuesday, I streamed CNN all day while my students and I watched President Obama take the oath of office.    Every class from K to 8th grade had a touch of live video screening of CNN.

I was pleased to see that CNN was adding their own version of Web 2.0  to the online watching process.  Next to the live feed, CNN was linked to facebook and users could add comments and talk about history in front of their computers.   Not all of us could go to Washington DC, but we can still be part of a global community.   We can share in history watching the inauguration and our voice being heard like it never has before.    I even logged into my facebook account, so my classes can feel part of the Web 2.0 community.

Here’s a little clip from Tech Crunchon the Facebook/Cnn hook up:  

It may be Obama Day today, but it was definitely also Facebook Day – the company had its Facebook Connect service integrated nicelyinto the live CNN.com coverage of the inauguration. Facebook users could log into Facebook while watching the event, read comments from friends (or anyone) and leave their own.

We updated our postat 10:15 PST with some of the user stats sent over by Facebook – over 600,000 status updates had been posted from the live stream by then.

We requested updated stats this evening, and got them. Things sure didn’t let up. Since this morning more than 1.5 million status updates have been posted through the feed (there were 200,000 b 8:30 am PST). During the broadcast an average of 4,000 status updates were written every minute, and 8,500 were written every minute during Obama’s speech.