CNN, Facebook partner

Interesting story on journalism.co.uk about CNN’s plans to incorporate social media into its coverage of President Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20.

So of course I had to log on and become a Facebook fan of CNN to see what it was all about. The event promo says:

What will your Facebook status say when Obama becomes President? CNN.com and Facebook are partnering to enable you to update your status, and follow you friends’ updates, while you watch the inauguration live online, all on http://cnn.com/live …
Whether you’re at the office, at home, at the library, or anywhere else, you can share this moment in history with your Facebook friends live, as it happens.

The story links to NPR (National Public Radio), which is requesting help with its social media coverage, including

• Mobcasting: audio recordings of voicemails left by listeners about their thoughts and feelings on inauguration day
• An inauguration tag of #inaug09 for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogs, etc
• Maps of user-generated content

iReport blog gathers news from masses

The maps feature is also prominent iReport, a site run by CNN with the disclaimer: “Only the stories marked ‘On CNN’ have been vetted by CNN for use in CNN’s global news coverage.”

Its world map feature lead me to a report on this fun gadget, a HD Video Recorder Snorkle Mask with Lights, shot at the CES in Las Vegas.

This massive crowd-sourced blog generated 225,003 reports worldwide last month, 1,085 of which ran on the CNN site also. That’s quite a content generator for the amount of resources needed.