Nontrivial Exercises

Yahoo’s Digital Time Capsule

Today I discovered the Yahoo Time Capsule. Yahoo is collecting expressions that capture our current world in various media forms through November 8. They have organized the collection around the following themes:

• love
• anger
• fun
• sorrow
• faith
• beauty
• past
• now
• hope
• you

Anyone can submit “words”, “picture”, “video”, “sound” or “drawing” media to the collection, and you can optionally add tags, a description, demographic info about yourself and your geography.

Yahoo summarizes the project on the about page:

Like everything Yahoo! does, it’s about you – our amazing users. We think there’s no one better suited to teach future generations what the world was like in 2006. For 30 days, from October 10 until November 8, Yahoo! users worldwide can contribute photos, writings, videos, audio – even drawings – to this electronic anthropology project. This is the first time that digital data will be gathered and preserved for historical purposes.

Time capsules are nothing new, but doing one on a global scale and digitally makes this really unique. It’s worth noting that Yahoo has committed to donate $100,000 to various charities as part of this project, and each time you make a submission you choose from one of the seven selected charity organizations. Presumably Yahoo will distribute the $100,000 proportionately among the organizations based on the contributors’ selections.

Whether you actually submit anything to the time capsule or not, it’s worthwhile to just check out the user interface and website design. Lots of AJAX and flash, but very tastefully and effectively done. You can browse through the current submissions to the time capsule and it’s just as addicting as browsing through Flickr.

If you do want to contribute, you only have until November 8, when Yahoo will seal the media collection and entrusted to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington D.C.