Transcript for RocketBoom_August_20_2007

Rocket boom

[Susan Crawford onewebday.org]

I am delighted to have Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay,

who is probably going to be the heroine of the internet in the coming years.

>>We're all the heroines of the internet. That's the point of onewebday.

It's always September 22nd, and it's happening all over the world in online forums and offline.

So, it's a day to help us understand how important the web is to our lives

and think about how we'd like the web to change the world in the future

and do some good works to help people get online and be more effective online while they're there.

>>Now this came about because there are ways that the web

is trying to be transformed into something that it's not right now.

So give me a little bit of background.

>>Well I was inspired by Earth Day.

Earth Day first took off when we saw a picture of the Earth from space,

and it's this fragile marble floating in a blue void, and we suddenly realized

that there was something we had to protect as people.

We haven't seen an image of the web. It isn't visual to us.

But actually, it's under threat as well all around the world in lots of different ways--

censorship, inadequate access, not enough personal input into the web--

and so I thought that we really needed an Earth Day for the web.

And that's what OneWebDay is.

>>Tell me, give me the biggest example of how OneWebDay made an impact last year.

Well I think people realized that--we had a lot of teaching sessions,

particularly in Eastern Europe, and I think the notion of editing a blog is a big deal.

To say, I leave part of myself online, is something you and I might take for granted,

but it's not so all over the world, and that has a major impact.

>>So what happens on September 22nd, and what's the build up from now until then?

>>Well, our big goal online this year is urging people to upload video

and tag it onewebday2007.

So Blip is helping us with this and YouTube will be helping us

and also a wonderful thing called SchoolTube which is for kids to post video.

And those videos should be about the following:

How has the web changed your life?

Tell us, tell the world the story about what's happened to you because of the web.

How would you like the web to change the world in the future?

What are some great things you've done with people in other countries online that the web makes possible?

We'd like those videos also to be made available through dotSUB.com

which allows anybody all over the world to subtitle a video in another language.

>>Which we're familiar with on Rocketboom.

>>Oh, you know about that? Okay great.

>>We are subtitled, yes, through dotSUB.

>>Oh I've seen that. Yes, wonderful.

So dotSUB plus user generated video plus this message about

your personal involvement with the web.

That's our focus for September 22nd.

So I want to urge as many people as possible to get this stuff online

so that other people can do mach-ups.

We can hold contests. We can do all kinds of things.

But we need it to be up as soon as possible so we can start looking at it.

I want people to remember that this is only 10 years old and it's changed the world,

and we're right at the very beginning of the web's history.

There's no telling what's going to happen in the future,

particularly if people see it as their own medium and not something that's distant from them.

www.rocketboom.com