Sure, I would have loved to see Obama in person—as one of our contributors commented, “that guy is a rock star.” But I think our report, in the end, was probably a better reflection of our mission at Xconomy than a single journalist’s first-hand report would have been. By reaching out to the community, we were able to bring our readers a diverse (and not wholly adulatory) group of perspectives on what the President said.

At Xconomy headquarters, we ordered Thai takeout for lunch and watched the speech on the Internet. In my personal view, the speech was long on cheerleading and short on specifics. But I guess a realpolitik view would say that you can’t fight every battle at once. It may be necessary to get healthcare reform nailed down before proceeding to the details of a climate change bill.

Apart from the policy stuff—it was interesting to ponder how much the President’s visit, which was announced only about 72 hours before he showed up, altered the daily schedules of thousands of people around Boston and Cambridge. There was the frenzy of competition to get an invitation to Kresge Auditorium, of course. But as I biked to work through the MIT campus on Friday, it was amazing to see how quickly the environment had been transformed into an armed camps, hordes of police and secret service officers, and the helicopters and army trucks and police boats circling about on the Charles—a transformation that was just as quickly undone after the President departed. And to think that this goes on everywhere the President travels. As I commented in a Twitter post, it’s a good thing the President doesn’t visit Boston every day, or we’d all be exhausted.