Unprecedented arrangement for coverage of Obama's Cairo speech

Rarely has any government in the past undertaken such an effort to make available the speech of its leader to millions of people across the globe, as is being done by the White House for the address of president Barack Obama to the Muslim world from Cairo on Thursday.
    
The White House has taken unprecedented measures to make sure that Obama's speech is listened and heard in every nook and corner of the world within minutes it is delivered. For this, White House has not only relied on the traditional media but is also making the best use of the new media to reach out to the people and offer them an opportunity to give
feedback.

Callers worldwide can register to receive free text messages of the speech in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English on www.america.gov/sms/html.

"Callers will receive text messages during the speech and have the option to reply and give feedback to the State Department. The State Department will collect and post feedback on the Website," Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs told correspondents accompanying the president in Cairo.

Besides being webcast live on whitehouse.gov, the website would carry links to fully translated transcripts of the speech in 13 different languages.

In addition, the full speech, its excerpts and videos with translations where applicable will be pushed not only on White House's YouTube site, but also on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts, Gibbs said. Orkut also has been added to this list given that it is the most popular social networking site in South Asia.
    
Facebook is the largest social networking site in the Islamic countries, reaching close to nearly 20 million users. For instance, there are 10 million users in Turkey, four million in Indonesia and 1.2 million in Egypt.
    
"We will create a special event page where subscribers can receive text messages and do live chatting during the speech and watch the video online. Facebook is doing a promotion of the event in Muslim countries," Gibbs said.

Networks in a number of countries around the world are going to show the speech, or plan to show the speech live with real-time translation, he added.

"Throughout the world, embassies are reaching out to the media in their countries to assure them that translations will be available. Obviously, I think in bigger countries in the world you'll see the speech actually broadcast live," he said.