Happy Birthday Yahoo!
I'm just so pleased, so chuffed, at Yahoo!'s birthday netrospective. It's beautiful.
World Net Day in 2006 will coincide with Earth Day. This makes sense, because the net has become a resource for the world, like air and water, that needs to be paid attention to. When's Earth Day, you ask? Well, this year it's on April 22. And next year it's also on April 22nd. It's always on April 22nd. So, now that we know the date, what should we do?
Yahoo!'s netrospective is just the kind of thing that World Net Day should encourage. We need to celebrate and protect the net — we also need to add more people to the net. And the idea should be to encourage many different projects to emerge. No one organization can pretend to control or manage World Net Day. Why can't World Net Day be a day to make sure there's greater connectivity in Africa and South America? Can we encourage a World Net Day tag to emerge, and use the aggregated data to build a monument to the net — online? Can we help people do something simple and artistic that has enormous aggregated impact online? (making art by 10 million people at once) Can we get designers involved to help us help the net visualize itself, for 24 straight hours, and then create displays that show that dynamic image? We somehow have to make this into a new plant form — a fun and interesting evolution of designs that let us “see” the net.
It's going to be a gratifying day of extraordinary online events, made up of many many people doing simple things that create beauty and interest. April 22, 2006.