Last night I watched the 2011 State of the Union address, conveniently streaming it via YouTube in 720p over the home wifi and out to my flatscreen Samsung TV here in Finland. I found the archive easily enough and noticed that the White House had conveniently split the screen to show helpful infographics on the right synced up with what was being said by President Obama on the left.
We are now officially a PowerPoint nation. Simple talking is no longer enough to engage us.
I’ve always voted democrat and am generally support the President but always take a grain of salt with any spoon-fed messages such as the one above (why is the kid on the right jumping for joy? Is it the tax cut?). There are other ways to look a the speech and the Vox project over at Rutgers is an interesting one.
Vox Event Analytics takes a look at the speech and syncs up a filtered tweet feed based on keywords and hashtags and then plays those back in the right margin while you view the speech. Along with this synchronized playback is also a playback of the tweet volume, keyword analysis, and sentiment of tweets over time. Vox, as the name implies, tries to reflect the reaction of the people (as reflected through their tweets) and it’s interesting to see what’s being said as the speech is going on.
Which do you prefer?
Leave a comment