As citizens swarmed the Capitol Mall in record numbers to be within earshot of Tuesday’s historic presidential inauguration, they stormed the Internet in equal measure.

In fact, people with Obama fever broke records across Yahoo! News on Tuesday, seeking as much news and information as possible. Let’s take a look at why:

• Historic milestone – That’s the no-brainer. It seemed that whether or not Americans voted for President Obama, they appreciated the significance of inaugurating our first African-American president. Global interest in this American tradition was never higher.
• Net news rules – As the Pew Research Center reported in December, the Internet has surpassed newspapers and all other mediums except television for national and international news. And even that is destined to change, considering 6 in 10 people under age 30 prefer the Web to TV for news. As more people turned to the Web on Tuesday, we saw our highest traffic day ever on Yahoo! News, with 12.3 million unique visitors (the equivalent of the populations of New York City and Los Angeles combined) logging 329 million page views. These eye-popping figures beat our previous records around Hurricanes Katrina and Ike.
• Web video has arrived – Online video is no longer seen as a spotty, unreliable medium fraught with outages and buffering, as it might have been in 2000 and 2004. While hiccups can still happen, it seems people now confidently log on to live news coverage online knowing they won’t miss a thing. That was paramount on Tuesday because the inauguration and ensuing festivities fell during the workday for Americans. Yahoo! News upped our video server capacity as we logged record video streams, surpassing even Election Day coverage.
• Photos attract – People like news stories, but they can’t seem to get enough of photos – both news agency and user generated. On average, people viewed more than 70 images per person among our 56 inauguration-related slideshows (vs. our normal 40 photos per person). Not surprisingly, the most viewed set was of First Daughters Malia and Sasha. Over at Flickr, people tagged more than 150,000 photos and videos with terms related to the inauguration, along with those newly submitted to the Commons by partners like the Smithsonian that show historic images of past inaugurations.

As demand for online news continues to grow, our team will look for new ways to help you sort through the volume of news information and formats available. Who knows what the next record-breaking event will be?

But one thing’s for sure. It’s nice to see Internet news come of age.

Neeraj Khemlani
VP & GM, Yahoo! News

A little more than a week since we launched the first online Presidential debate (or mashup, as we like to call it), it’s time to announce the winner and share some additional “results.”

In our poll, which asked people who they’d vote for after watching the mashup, Barack Obama was the winner with 35% of the votes. Senator Obama squeaked by Hillary Clinton, who received 31% of the votes. To hear what Obama had to say about winning, check out our “People of the Web” story on the results, which includes an interview we conducted this morning.

But the votes don’t tell the entire story. We also looked at which clips the audience was actually watching and came away with some interesting findings:

• Hillary Clinton was by far the most watched candidate. Thirty-five percent of all clips watched were Clinton’s, while Obama came in second with 25%.
• The audience was most interested in the “wildcard” question, in which comedian Bill Maher surprised each candidate with personalized questions on a variety of topics. Forty-two percent of the clips watched were wildcard questions, followed by Iraq (34%), healthcare (15%), and education (9%).
• Women were more interested in education and healthcare, while men preferred the wildcard question.
• Older Americans were more likely to select questions on the topic of healthcare, while younger Americans were more interested in what the candidates had to say on education (that one didn’t surprise us much).
• The most popular clip among women in Iowa was Edwards on healthcare.
• Dennis Kucinich was one of the most viewed candidates in Seattle.

Part of what made the Presidential mashup so interesting to me was that we were putting control in Presidential forum like never before, and it was an exciting experiment to see what our users cared about most.

And speaking of users, you may be asking yourself how many people actually watched this debate. We had more than 1.1 million viewers, who streamed approximately 4.4 million video clips. Thirty-nine percent of the audience represented the 18-35 demographic. That means our debate attracted about 429,000 18- to 35-year-olds. That’s more from this demographic than any debate so far!

If you haven’t yet had an opportunity to check out the debate, you can do so here, or head over to Jumpcut to mash it up for your own site. We’re still in talks with the Republican candidates and hope to have an update on the next debate soon.

Neeraj Khemlani
VP, Programming & Development
Yahoo! News & Info

The Internet has given voice to millions of people’s political, social, and even spiritual passions. We might visit their sites every day, but what do we know about the people behind them?

Today we’re launching a new series called “People of the Web,” which will explore the stories behind the most interesting people and characters on the Internet.

The series, hosted by veteran journalist Kevin Sites, takes you behind the keyboard to introduce you to people of social significance. You’ll encounter Mike Rogers, a gay blogger who uses the Internet to out closeted politicians he considers hypocritical for working to pass anti-gay legislation, and Kirk Cameron, the former “Growing Pains” star who now runs an evangelical ministry that reaches millions of people online. We spend time with recently imprisoned video blogger Josh Wolf , examining his controversy and questioning whether an activist can also be a journalist. And we meet a 94-year-old Baptist minister and his 35-year-old Burning Man-disciple grandson who started an online hug movement with the site Hug Nation.

Given that last year the same team covered war zones with “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,” you might be asking yourself, how did they go from covering global conflicts to covering stories about the Internet? The answer is simple: our goal is to tell interesting stories that aren’t being told. Last year we worked to put a human face on war, and we like to think we did a good job of bringing the important stories about the people within each war zone to our audience. (In fact, the project won several awards including a Webby and the National Headliner Award, and Kevin was awarded the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage in Journalism.)

This year, we hope to put a human face on the Internet. While there’s certainly plenty of coverage about Internet businesses and technologies, no major news outlets are covering the stories about the people creating followings, controversies or awareness via the Internet. We believe it’s a unique beat and one that’s expanding exponentially — so there’s no shortage of great material.

You’ll notice we’ve integrated MyBlogLog. That’s both so you can connect with more “People of the Web” as well as place yourself in the running as a personality we might profile.

To hear more about this project from Kevin — in his own words — check out a short video we put together. Then let us know what you think of the site.

Neeraj Khemlani
VP, Programming & Development
Yahoo! News & Info