I generally don’t get into politics. Too controversial and I’m just not that into politics, especially on a national scale.

However, doing what I do, I can’t help but notice what our new President Obama has done with social media and the web already, and I can’t wait to see if it continues.

Well, so far so good. At 12:01 est on the day of the Inauguration the first White House blog debuted. If people were doubting the legitimacy of blogs…well, I think that’s a pretty good indicator for you.

Now on to some fun stuff.

Here’s a link to some Inauguration pictures on the Big Picture. Amazing photo site.

Here’s a link to the Inaugural address on YouTube.

I’m constantly asked for different statistics or metrics to justify what people want to do or are doing. Sometimes it drives me a little crazy that some people still don’t understand what’s going on with the web. There are still groups that seem to think the web is a fad and not an integral business and communications channel.

For those that are somehow still in that group, here’s a great post from futurebuzz.com. Here’s ten of the more interesting statistics here but do visit the link for the full list. Very impressive.

• 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) – approximate number of unique URLs in
• 2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily
• 2,695,205 – the number of articles in English on Wikipedia
• 684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year
• 70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube (March 2008)
• 412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)
• 133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
• 346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)
• more than 1,111,991,000 tweets to date on Twitter
• 150,000,000 – number of active users on Facebook

This stuff isn’t going away people.