Yahoo! Opens Internet Time Capsule to Capture Contemporary Life

WebKnowHow
Tuesday, October 10, 2006; 05:15 AM

Yahoo! announced the launch of what is expected to be the world’s largest time capsule in history. Starting today, Yahoo! is encouraging people from around the world to contribute personal photos, stories, thoughts, ideas, poems, home movies and art to this first-ever electronic anthropology project designed to document life in 2006. In celebration of the project, Yahoo! will illuminate one of the most well-preserved sites from ancient times by projecting selected time capsule submissions onto The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico from October 25-27, 2006, as well as beaming the material into space. Submissions for the Yahoo! Time Capsule can be made at timecapsule.yahoo.com or by searching for “Yahoo! Time Capsule” on Yahoo!.

“One in two Internet users around the world use Yahoo!, and we are proud to document this moment in history with them in celebration of the global online community,” said Jerry Yang, co-founder and Chief Yahoo!. “Wherever people use Yahoo! – from Mexico, Germany or China to the U.S. – we want them to represent their culture and show us what’s important to them by participating in this historic Internet time capsule event. It will be fascinating to see what people submit as their part of this 2006 snapshot, which will be shared with generations to come.”

The Yahoo! Time Capsule will be featured on over 20 localized Yahoo! home pages around the world, including www.yahoo.com. Users are invited to visit the time capsule microsite, designed by renowned Internet artist Jonathan Harris, and upload text, images, video, audio or drawings free of charge. Everyone, from students to seniors, is encouraged to participate with submissions on topics such as love, anger, fun, sorrow, faith, beauty, past, now, hope and “you.” The time capsule site will take users’ contributed multimedia content and weave it into a single piece of digital art online. Submitters will also be given the opportunity to choose from seven global charities, which will each receive a donation from Yahoo! at the end of the project.

Yahoo! has chosen Teotihuacan, a symbolic UNESCO site in Mexico, to display content from this time capsule because of its role in the preservation of ancient culture. Content from the most modern of time capsules will be projected directly onto the ancient 216-foot tall pyramid, viewable via a simultaneous worldwide web cast. In addition, Yahoo! will send the content into space through a digitized laser light beam from the historic monument – bringing together the past and the present with the universe’s potential future by sharing today’s culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away.

Following the screening, time capsule content will be saved onto a digital archive and sealed, to be opened at Yahoo! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. on the company’s 25^th anniversary in the year 2020. In addition, copies of this content will be presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings archives in Washington, DC as well as to The National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City to be preserved, studied and shared with future generations.

Yahoo's collection of snapshots from 2006.