Events took place around the world in celebration of OneWebDay on Friday.

Susan Crawford, law professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, planned and created the first annual OneWebDay, September 22, 2006, as a day to celebrate the World Wide Web and the Internet.

Events have been held and are planned from Tokyo to San Francisco, and from Vancouver to the Philippines.

“The web is seriously underappreciated,” said David Weinberger, a fellow at HarvardLawSchool’s BerkmanCenter for Internet & Society and a board member of the OneWebDay organization. “People forget how much of a difference the Internet has made in our lives and is making in our institutions.”

Mr. Weinberger is co-hosting a pizza party and open discussion on how the web has changed people’s lives, in Boston at the BerkmanCenter.

Ms. Crawford, also a member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that manages IP address and domain names, persuaded a number of Internet visionaries to speak worldwide about the Internet and how it has transformed their lives. Ms. Crawford was understandably too busy to comment at press time Friday.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the standards organization the World Wide Web Consortium, will speak at the Royal Exchange Grand Cafe & Bar in London.

The Lord Mayor’s office of London could not confirm Mayor Alderman David Brewer was speaking on Friday at the Manor House about the future of the web, as suggested by the OneDayWeb event listings.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, will be joined by Drew Schutte, vice president and publisher of Wired magazine, along with Ms. Crawford, in New York City’s Battery Park. Robert Pepper, senior managing director of policy at Cisco Systems and former chief of policy at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, was in Tokyo with Internet entrepreneur Joi Ito earlier on Friday.

Some 20 other events, including meetings in surprising locations like Belgrade; Serbia; and Sofia, Bulgaria; also took place.

Shake Your Mouse

When Ms. Crawford asked Diana Marrone, one of the founders of the Media & Arts Office in Naples, Italy, to help host a WebOneDay in Italy, Ms. Marrone jumped at the chance.

“We recently founded this association, so we welcomed Ms. Crawford’s offer very much,” said Ms. Marrone. “OneWebDay will help promote the knowledge and the critical confrontation that goes along with media and the digital arts.”

Ms. Marrone has asked two Italian journalists—Daniela D’Antonio from La Repubblica and Natascia Festa from Corriere della sera—to speak about their blogs, and the real-time open dialogues that blogs can create, as opposed to paper newspapers. The Naples event will be filmed, and guests can choose the party’s music from playlists supplied by Pandora.com.

A Little History

The roots of the web can be traced back to 1980, in Mr. Berners-Lee’s ENQUIRE, a private closed system for the Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research.

It was not until 1990 that Mr. Berners-Lee, along with Robert Cailliau, created a proposal for the World Wide Web.

The web has grown remarkably since those early days. In a 2005 study by Antonio Gulli, director of search engine and advanced products at Ask.com, and Alessio Signorini, senior search engineer at Ask.com, there were 11.5 billion indexed pages on the World Wide Web. Eight billion of those pages can be found on Google, with over 50 percent of those pages in English.

Contact the writer:Editorial@RedHerring.com

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