President Obama gave his 2011 State of the Union speech tonight and while he covered a lot of ground, from health care to education to the elimination of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” all of which pundits across the country are analyzing as I type this, I was really intrigued by the White House’s use of graphics that was used in the live streaming of the hour long broadcast.

I like watching the online version because it tends to cut out all the clutter that television news broadcasts add to it, but the graphics, which included photography as well, were frankly pretty well done and added great context to what Obama was saying.

Just yesterday, the White House Blog published a post about the enhanced version of the State of the Union, in a post titled “You’ve Never Seen a State of the Union Address Like This Before.”

“This “Enhanced SOTU” feature is just one of many ways we are working to provide as much information as possible and answer your questions about the speech,” wrote the White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips.

It’s no secret that this presidency has utilized social and new media in unforeseen ways, even before Obama arrived at the White House, so this feature isn’t unexpected perhaps, but it was nice to see the integration of understated graphics that enhanced the speech, instead of taking away from it, a feat that some news broadcasts still haven’t managed to do. The example that comes to mind is CNN’s use of over complicated graphics that seem to confuse me more than anything else – see: “CNN’s ‘Electric Matirx’ projected as loser in tv technology race.”

NPR, who asked listeners to describe the speech in three words, also had something cool to offer: a word cloud of people’s impressions of the State of the Union.