Obama Rocks the Web Big-Time today

(photo from CNN snipped grabbed on AD Week website article)

President Obama has shown the world that he is the man. Earlier today at the office i noticed that the web was crawling away in speed. I've never seen it this slow. But, then it hit me. BAM all the video feeds were eating up bandwidth on the web like a crazy fireside sale where everything must go.

After doing a little bit of pocking around the web this is what I've found out so far about the web feeds being shown today:
CNN - reporting more than 18.8 million live feeds

MSN - reporting over 9 million live feeds and over 80 million page views

Facebook - reporting over 600,000 updates at a rate of 4,000 / min

This is a new high usage mark in video feeds.

I have been keeping up with the events all day via AP video feed which has worked best for me. They have had a great live video feed all day from a link off the Chicago Tribune website. Many various cell phone users were also affected by the usage from either not getting service or in and out coverage in their area. With the excitement and information in the air today's technology got a good workout from the web to mobile phones they were in full use and delivered on demand.

So i end this post with my hat off to all the people in the technology sector that kept us up to date on events today and made our day a bit more complete with knowing what was going on as it was happening. Thank You for a great job well done.

Obama's Inauguration Rocks the Web (Ad Week)
Inauguration pass or fail? Social network, streaming video report card (zd.net)
Inauguration Taxes Mobile Phone Networks (PC World)

Cloud Computing an alternative for Government Computing

(image for cloud computing center found on brajeshwar.com)

President Obama's tech team is looking into incorporating cloud computing for Government use and efficiency. Cloud computing gives users a great advantage of security and ease of use from anywhere when requested. Check out the YouTube video by the Obama Tech Team.

Cloud computing has been around for a while now, more and more people are starting to look into the valuable use it offers. One of the great things is basically having as much computing power as you need and only paying for what you use. Allowing a company to put on their own custom version of the operating system they require and even create custom versions of various OS's and then leasing it out to perspective customers too.

I was at a lecture last year at my Chicago Java Users Group and we had Mike Culver a representative from Amazons Cloud computing giving us a great talk on the in's and out's of using this technology.

One of the great examples he gave was a well known newspaper's desire to digitize a great amount of old papers into pdf format. By incorporating cloud computing into the mix they were able to use an array of super computing processing for a small cost to get what they need done. The interesting thing was the whole process which would have taken weeks on regular PCs took just 24 hours using cloud computing technology from Amazon. They realized that there was a mistake in how they did something in their process and ended up re-doing it in another 24 hours and still saved a bundle on the whole process.

I am glad to see government finally start to look out at the great technology that is available for use at a fraction of the cost of purchasing aging hardware and replacing it as its breaks down.

More about cloud computing at Obama Tech Teams Touts Cloud Computing