Elgan: The digital camera presidency

Computerworld - Much has been written about technology and Barack Obama. The conventional wisdom is that the Obama campaign's superior use of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, helped win the election.

After the election, but before the inauguration, it was assumed that Obama would have to stop using his BlackBerry for security reasons. This week it emerged that he'll be able to keep it, but now pimped out with some top-secret NSA security software. He'll be the first president ever to carry a cell phone.

But the technology that should be most closely associated with the Obama campaign and presidency is the overlooked and underappreciated digital camera. Here's why.

CNN

During the inauguration, CNN broadcasted digital photographs from a satellite showing the 1.5 million people who gathered for the event. The pictures were provided by a high-resolution satellite photography company called GeoEye. CNN's chief national correspondent John King said that the broadcasting of the photos represented the fastest "turnaround" of digital satellite photography for nonmilitary purposes ever.

Also interesting was that a solid majority of those 1.5 million people -- possibly approaching 80% or even 90% -- were taking pictures with digital cameras, digital camcorders or the digital cameras in their cell phones. Let's say, conservatively, that just 1 million inauguration attendees had cameras, and that the average user took just 50 pictures. If true, that means some 50 million digital photographs were taken on a single day at a single event. That's got to be some kind of record.

CNN decided to harness some of those pictures to do something else unprecedented. CNN anchors had been asking people on air several days before the inauguration to participate in a unique experiment. They asked viewers attending the inauguration to snap digital pictures and e-mail them to CNN. Thousands of these images were placed into Microsoft's Photosynth application to create a navigable 3-D version of the swearing in -- made up entirely of the stitched-together submitted photos -- which you can interact with using Microsoft's Silverlight application.

After the inauguration, Obama and his wife, Vice President Joseph Biden and other dignitaries drove down Pennsylvania Avenue in bomb-proof limos. The streets were lined with throngs of supporters, nearly all taking digital pictures and videos.

It was a tense moment, because the president got out of the car and walked down the street in public. The Secret Service was everywhere, including on the surrounding rooftops. Interestingly, Secret Service sniper teams were clearly using pocketsize digital cameras throughout the inauguration day. Everything these people do is unknown to the public -- that's what makes the Secret Service so secret -- but there are two possibilities. The least likely is that they were taking pictures for their own use. "Wow, my wife's not going to believe this!" -- that kind of thing. The most likely is that they were using digital cameras to compile information for future events and for the post-mortem analysis of the inauguration for internal use and future training and preparation.

After the parade, the president and his wife attended 10 inauguration balls. At each ball, the first couple would breeze in, Obama would say a few words, they would dance with each other for half a song, then take off for the next event. At these exclusive parties, the penetration of digital cameras was probably nearing 100%. When the Obamas were on stage, just about everyone was pointing a digital camera at them, and some people were pointing two.