Internet traffic hit a record peak on Tuesday as millions of people around the world sought to watch and read about the inauguration of President Obama.

The web and TV are coming together and we saw evidence of that yesterday. The web isn’t quite ready to handle the traffic, but we are seeing video content bringing more people online and keeping them online for longer. Text will always be important on the web – the multimedia nature of it makes it more interesting than TV which is a passive medium. But video is becoming the dog to the text tail and nonprofit organizations — and businesses — need to get their online video game on.

From today’s NY Times

Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected.

When people are checking for election results or the score for a big game, they tend to produce smaller bursts of traffic spread out over several hours. On Tuesday, everyone wanted to watch video, and that produced bulky streams of data traveling from media companies’ data centers out to people at work and in their homes.

Data from CNN.com captured the uniqueness of the online surge. CNN said it provided more than 21.3 million video streams over a nine-hour span up to midafternoon. That blew past the 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day. At its peak, CNN.com fed 1.3 million live streams simultaneously, according to Jennifer Martin, a spokeswoman for the site.

Akamai, which helps companies meet demand for their online offerings, worked with media companies like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Viacom to stream live video. It reported a record-breaking day, feeding up seven million video streams at one time.

I had the great pleasure of being in DC yesterday for the inauguration (though I chose to watch it inside on a big screen tv). Obviously, there will be huge changes in how our government works and acts and speaks. One small sign of this is on the web where the Obama administration just unveiled the all new WhiteHouse.gov, the official website of the White House.

Web designer Bryce Tugwell noticed a small, technical change to the WhiteHouse.gov website that in effect sums up a lot that will be different with the new administration:

Just as an additional side note on this conversation [about the new site], here’s a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here’s the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov the day before yesterday:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text

And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines! Effectively locking search engines out from the vast majority of the site.
Here’s the new Obamafied robots.txt file :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

That’s it! BTW, the robots.txt file tells search engines what to include and not include in their indexes.

Bryce

Nice post today from Ari Mebler in the Nation about Obama’s email list.

First of all, it’s big. Very big.

…In 2004, John Kerry’s list hit three million, and some estimated Obama’s list could top five million. That would make it double the size of the largest email lists in U.S. politics, including older web groups like MoveOn. It turns out those estimates weren’t even close.

Obama’s list now tops a whopping ten million people, according to today’s Washington Post.
The article does not directly attribute that figure to anyone. The same paragraph cites “senior aides,” however, to report that the list is so financially valuable that it was “briefly offered” as loan “collateral during a cash-flow crunch.” A source in a position to know also told me that the email list has reached eleven million people.

Obama has DIRECT CONTACT with 16% of the people who voted for him. This is new, and it’s powerful:

So even after the gauzy honeymoon talk fades, when people start second-guessing how much “political capital” Obama really has, there will be this resilient network of people committed to enacting the Obama agenda. In a policy fight with Congress — or a message battle with the press — these are the people that will take action to get Obama’s back. They will call their neighbors, or their members of Congress. They’ll knock on doors, or storm local meetings. They’ll write letters to the editor or, naturally, email and prod their networks.

Link: [The Nation]

I think competence will be the biggest change with an Obama administration. Today they launched Change.gov the online “Office of the President-Elect.”

President-Elect Obama (wow!) is transitioning from campaign mode to governing mode and the millions of supporters become the first connected group of constituents. This community can become a hammer against Congress as he pursues his agenda.

This effort is about transparency, community and communication — everything you need to be doing in your nonprofit. Stay tuned.

So, the election is over. What now? Stay away from the Obama-Zombies. From our friends at The Onion.

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

The comedic piece everyone is talking about today is from Ron Howard, which I have pasted below. I think there is certainly an age thing here. I get it, I appreciate it. My younger employees, not so much.

[Just to bring this back to our subject for a minute. Is it a coincidence that all this comedy is video and not a really witty blog post? Video people. It's the other white meat, it's what's for dinner, and breakfast and lunch. It's what you need to be doing to get your messages out.]

Alison Fine just gave us a head’s up about a cool project she developed with her colleague Nancy Scola to help ensure a fair and safe election for all U.S. citizens. It’s called Twitter Voter Report and it brings together a team of techies, Twitter users and a Wiki to aggregate information on voting day.

From their website:

On November 4th 2008, millions of Americans will go to over 200,000 distinct voting locations and using different systems and machinery to vote. Some voters will have a terrific experiences, and others will experience the same problems we have been hearing about for years – long lines, broken machines, inaccurate voting rolls, and others will experience problems that we haven’t heard about before. Using Twitter.com and 1-866-Our-Vote Hotline, voters will have a new way to share these experiences with one another and ensure that the media and watchdog groups are aware of any problems.

As news outlets and blogs will report on Election Day stories, we are building an invaluable resource for thousands of voters to get immediate help. From questions like “where do I vote” or “how do I make sure that my rights are being upheld,” Twitter Voter Report augments these efforts by providing a new way for voters to send text messages (aka tweets) via cellphones or computers which will be aggregated and mapped so that everyone can see the Nation’s voting problems in real-time.

Imagine a Nationwide web map with pins identifying every zip code where Americans are waiting over 30 minutes to vote or indicating those election districts where the voting machines are not working. Collectively we will inform each other when when the lines too long and ensure that media and watchdog groups know where problems exist.

You can follow the project on Twitter: @voterreport
or join the VoteReport Google Group.