Tonight, President Barack Obama will deliver one of his last State of the Union addresses, and it's being live-streamed online with all sorts of digital bells and whistles. Here's a rundown of how to follow along all the political action tonight.
Official White House livestream
The White House has put considerable design power into live-streaming the speech with enhanced graphics. The simplest way to watch is via the White House YouTube channel (which we've embedded below). There's a normal version, plus an enhanced version, with PowerPoint-like graphics.
The normal version shows you scenes of half of Congress clapping at whatever the President says. In the enhanced version, you can see a slightly smaller version of an obstinate Legislative Branch squeezed next to graphs illustrating the economic impact of the President's proposals.
Pin-tastic website
Already, there's a Pinterest-ified version of the State of the Union on the White House website; it has the familiar horizontal panels layout, which showcase behind-the-scenes speech prep and a few of the early announcements Obama made on the road last week (like proposals to make community college free and expand broadband access).
The White House design team clearly wants to appeal to the about-to-be-married Midwestern female demographic here. And, all things considered, I'm OK with the White House bending to our new crock-pot-loving overlords.
Hashtag it up, yo
On Twitter itself, #SOTU is usually a safe bet to get a running feed of the Twitter peanut gallery. If you only want influencer SOTU sweets, head over to search.twitter.com and filter by "top tweets."
Later (on Thursday), the President will conduct a live interview with YouTube celebrities Bethany Mota, GloZell, and Hank Green, who are fielding questions asked by their fans. You can attempt to get your own question answered with the Twitter hashtag #YouTubeAsksObama.
Fun fact: The State of the Union is one of the only constitutionally mandated actions for the President. All the other stuff, from the Oval Office to the annual turkey pardon, merely evolved into custom. But the SOTU? That's the law of the land.
So enjoy our little slice of constitutionally mandated democracy tonight along with VentureBeat and your social media pals. We'll be watching (and commenting).