Like millions of other people in the United States, and all over the world, I watched the Presidential Inauguration today. I'm at work, and streamed a live feed from CNN. I was fortunate enough to load it up well before 10:00 AM, and it's a good thing I did: Other people who tried to stream it right at noon found themselves waiting in a queue because of the sheer number of people trying to watch.

I really don't have much to say about the inauguration itself. It was nice. Barack gave a good speech. Now we all just need to wait and see if he's actually going to be able to do all the things he's promised he's going to do. This is the same thing that happens with any new president. I'm not trying to play down the significance of his taking office, I'm simply being realistic. No politician is ever able to fulfill all of their promises.

Anyway, what I found unique about CNN's live stream is their little partnership with Facebook that they had going on. When you were streaming the live video, you had a little pane to the right of the screen with scrolling text. It was very similar to Twitter, if you're familiar with that "mini-blogging" service. This pane was literally scrolling constantly as people were leaving comments. Anyone could sign up and post, and have their comment scroll by for a few seconds before being replaced by the next person's comments.

While that seems neat, I couldn't help but wonder how they were filtering the comments. Because, I mean come on now, when you open up something like that to anybody, you're going to have a whole bunch of people leaving comments that are inappropriate. Did they have a computer with a database of filthy words, and any comments containing those world were nuked before they were posted on the site for millions of people to see? Or did they have a monkey sitting there deleting any that where deemed inappropriate?

The comments appeared so that the user's name appeared first and their comment followed after so it was in a format like this:

"Linda is so excited."

I would assume the user typed in "is so excited" to get their comment to appear that way, and that's what a majority of the people were doing. Of course some were a bit slow at this whole Twittering thing and didn't make their comment appear as an action. Noobs.

In any case, the Filthy-Word-Nuking-Computer or the Delete-Bad-Post-Monkey (whichever CNN decided to go with) seemed to work pretty well. For the most part. I'm sitting there watching the video and casually looking at the comments scrolling by:

"John is watching the video while working."
"Sanchez is glad he's not out in the bitter cold."
"Tyrone is masterbating."

I guess they didn't think to input misspelled filthy words into the computer. (Or the monkey was on a banana break.)