In anticipation of today’s inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, I looked at Hitwise data to find out what people are doing in the run-up to the big day. Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself googling for the date, time, order of the day, history of the Lincoln bible and a few other tidbits at various dinners and gatherings. I am not alone. Searches that included the word “inauguration” numbered 2,721 last week with “inauguration”, “inauguration day 2009″ and “obama inauguration” topping the list.
Bill Tancer, General Manager of Research for Hitwise and author of the New York Times best selling book Click, wrote more about our frame of mind (and Beyonce controversy) in the lead up to today’s festivities in a guest post for the Wall Street Journal.
A story on Techmeme caught my eye yesterday about “Change.gov coming to the White House”. I checked our rankings data and indeed change has also come to our Politics category. Change.gov entered the top 20 websites along with several other Obama-related websites. The following ranking shows the top 10 last week, based on share of US Internet visits.

Notice Change.gov, USA Service, and BarackObama.com in the top 10.
Obama’s team has made it clear that it plans to communicate directly with the public, as it did throughout the campaign. Each of these websites starts by asking for an email address. The tactic seems to be working.
The Obama campaign reportedly had over 10 million email addresses. Last week, Change.gov received 15% of its US Internet visits from web-based email services. USAService.org received 53% of visits from email services and BarackObama.com, 26%.
It will be interesting to watch as issues and events unfold in the coming months whether these direct channels to the public remain popular and whether we’ll start to see more email traffic to Government websites overall.
With Obama’s rock star-like following and a star-studded ball welcoming him to the White House, we are sure to see some interesting behavior online for the inauguration. Stay tuned, we’ll do a follow up post-inauguration.