President Barack Obama will deliver his fourth State of the Union address tonight at 6 p.m PST with Apple CEO Tim Cook on hand. It will be interesting to see if Obama speaks about technology and/or entrepreneurship — if you recall last year’s speech, Obama sounded more like a venture capitalist than the president of the United States.
Anyways, here are some tech tips to help make your viewing experience much more interactive tonight.
The White House has some pretty cool little features in store tonight.
Like last year, WhiteHouse.gov will stream an enhanced version of the address complete with charts, graphs and data to help back up Obama’s statements. All this will be available at the White House YouTube, Google+,Hulu, Facebook, and Ustream pages. The White House is also introducing a new tool called Citizen Response that lets you highlight a passage from the speech, write about how you’re connected to that issue and then share that specific part with friends.
After the speech, a live panel with White House policy experts will be on hand to answer questions. Submit your question on Twitter with a #WHChat hashtag and watch on the panel answer questions via the White House website.
Obama will also be dong a “Fireside Hangout” on Thursday. He’ll be answering questions from viewers on a Google+ Hangout starting at 1:30 p.m. PST.
And if you’re away from a computer, the White House has some nice mobile apps to keep you connected.
Bing has huge plans for tonight’s speech and is embarking on “one of its most ambitious projects yet.”
The Microsoft search engine claims to be hosting “the largest interactive State of the Union experience in history” at Bing.com/Politics. Partnering with FOX and Foxnews.com, Bing is launching Bing Pulse to allow users to give real-time feedback on the President’s speech.
While watching, you can “vote” every five seconds on reactions to the speech and real-time results of the Bing Pulse will be shown at Bing.com/Politics and on FOX News Channel. “We think this will be the largest live online poll in history,” Bing touts.
Then there’s the Bing Beat, which analyzes social media sentiment on a bevy of issues from healthcare to gun control.
“Visit Bing.com/Politics to join the largest interactive State of the Union experience in history and see another reason to choose Bing over Google,” this blog post reads.
Social Media
We’ve already mentioned the social media projects the White House is putting on, but of course there are more ways to interact via Twitter, Facebook, etc.
For starters, it seems like the universal hashtag is #SOTU on Twitter.
The Week has this Twitter politics list set up and The League of Young Voters is hosting events and discussions today on UStream called #BarackTalk.
For Republican-only tweets, the Republican House has set up a website for the party’s State of the Union response. You can also follow @GOP for the Republican National Committee.
And finally, here are Twitter lists for House Republicans and House Democrats.
