Watch Barack Obama’s inauguration live and discuss it as it happens with your online friends. That is the setup as CNN teams up with Facebook for the political event of the year.

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CNN’s live coverage of the Obama inauguration is a very interesting example of how a professional media company can work together with one of the biggest social networks.

CNN has created a Facebook Event for the inauguration and as I write more than 1,1 million Facebook users have confirmed that they will attend the event.

As the live coverage is taking place on CNN,  users will be able to connect to their own Facebook friends and discuss with them as the event is streaming.

My guess is that we will see many more examples like this in the coming year.

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It was described as a hologram – and was used for the first time in the TV business. But is CNN’s hologram experiment really adding value to the news coverage?

I must admit I was intrigued. And also proud – being from Norway. Because the technology behind the hologram experiment was provided by the Norwegian company Virzt.

This is how it looked on CNN:

But is the experiment really adding to the value of the news coverage? E-Media Tidbits, the online media blog from Poynter Institute, has some doubts.

Amy Gahran writes:

In my opinion, this stunt succeeded in being visually interesting and entertaining. I personally like that CNN experiments with new tools, on TV and online. However, this particular tool added absolutely nothing to the substance of the coverage — and thus, it became a mere stunt that trivialized CNN’s coverage.

I think it is an interesting reflection. While the technology is amazing, we need to ask whether it actually improves the credibility of the medium.

Personally I think CNN is doing OK. And the main reason is that they do not pretend that the person actually is in the same room as the anchor.

But if they cross that border, pretending that the image is real, the credibility certainly is at risk.

It will be very interesting to observe how this technology will be used by the media in the years to come.