I am fortunate to live in DC so was able to walk to the Mall in the frigid cold yesterday and experience the excitement and good spirits of the enormous 1.8 million? crowd. Then I walked back home to warmth and to watch the swearing in on HDTV.

Also followed Twitter #inaugu2009 and #inaug09 on my iPhone and checked out CNN’s crowdsourced journalism, iReport. I sent the photo above to [email protected] to contribute to CNN’s 3D Photosynth of the event. Have no idea whether it was used (and Microsoft’s 3D app only works on Windows!).  But I uploaded the photo to iReport today and see it here.

Jeremiah Owyang asks whether readers of his blog used old or new media to experience the Inauguration. The answer, of course, is all of the above.

President Obama struck an essential note in his Inaugural Address (watch the video): it’s time for all of us to assume responsibility, to serve and to make history as we help remake America. And we can do some of this using social media.

I detected a sly humor in the fact that the first blog post went up on the newly relaunched whitehouse.gov at 12:01 PM on Jan. 20, 2009. That was the exact moment at which Obama officially became President (even though the swearing in hadn’t taken place).

I’m thoroughly inspired. Obama’s words prompted me to research volunteer opportunities for tutoring and literacy near where I live.

An AMAZING forever memorable day.