Today is a one of the most important days in political history. Finally the US, and the World, has a great leader in President 2.0, Barack Obama – of whom we should be truly proud. I’m confident that waving goodbye to Bush will indeed present a positive new era of change that has been resconating throughout Obama’s ground-breaking campaign.

Like millions of people across the world, I would love to be a part of history on the ground in Washington or a packed bar. However I have some work to attend to, and will therefore be watching it on TV, with one eye on the internet – where never before has an event been so well covered.

Qik enables people to stream their experiences live on the internet via their mobile phone; however, given phone networks should be pushed to full capacity, the quality of these feeds will probably leave a lot to be desired. Nevertheless, Qik have partnered with a number of traditional new organisations, including BBC and CBS to distribute spectator footage.

Ustream.tv also has an inauguration channel, which is now also access also available via their new iPhone application.

Even the traditional news networks are covering the event in true realtime social 2.0 style! CNN and Facebook have collaborated to create a mashup whereby live status updates from all viewers appear streaming in realtime next to the live inauguration footage. Your status update may optionally be shared with all viewers, which will easily be quite a few million people! The screenshot to the right shows my 2 seconds of inaugural fame.

Another staggering inaugral experiment comes courtesy of Microsoft Photosynth. This revolutionary software enables a number of photos to be stitched together automatically to create a 3D scene. Both Microsft and CNN will shoot many thousands of professional photographs and combine these with submissions from spectators! Given the scene is refined and improved with each additional photo that’s fed into the system, I’m expecting a fully immersive inaugural world to be created! [UPDATE: here's the finished Photosynth]

We can all play a small part in history; even from our desk – just send a Tweet with the hashtag #inaug09, and you can be sure that message will be archived forever as a personal thought connected with the event. This level of engagement in a political event is unprecedented, whilst somehow managing to blur the boundaries between global and individual participation.

And finally, on the eve of his inauguration Obama started tweeting again, after remaining silent since 5th November! Earlier this month, I wrote about a security breach at Twitter that lead to a number of high profile accounts being compromised. Thankfully this hasn’t prevented @barackobama becoming active again, along with a new @obamainaugral account. It would be a shame for Obama to abandon the new social tools that played such a major role in him winning the election. Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, will be pleased as he tweets his experiences live from Washington!

Here’s a more comprehensive list of live Twitter feeds to follow; and an excellent inauguration guide from TechCrunch.

UPDATE 21/01

• for the above CNN / Facebook mashup, there were 13.9 million live video streams globally between 6am and 11:45am, and over 200k Facebook status updates – via mashable. I wonder how many terabytes per second that is?!
• according to the Twitter blog, there were up to 5x the number of tweets-per-second, compared to last week. Some people experienced a slight delay, but the service remained active throughout!

No doubt there are more examples of enabling new technologies being put to use on this historic day. Please do share your comments below.