Yahoo! Announces Time Capsule

Yahoo! has announced the launch of what it calls the world's largest time capsule in history.

Starting this week, Yahoo! is encouraging people from around the world to contribute personal photos, stories, thoughts, ideas, poems, prayers, home movies, music, and art to this first-ever electronic anthropology project designed to document life in 2006.

The company says that people will be able to view and explore all submissions between October 10, when the time capsule opens, and November 8, when the time capsule closes. In addition to browsing the time capsule content, people can sort and compare the contributions by country, region, race, age, gender, amongst many.

Speaking on the occasion, Jerry Yang, co-founder and chief of Yahoo!, said, "We are proud to document this moment in history to celebrate the power of the global online community and to provide a snapshot of who we are in 2006 to share with generations to come."

"Wherever people use Yahoo!, 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," added Yang.

The Yahoo! Time Capsule will be featured on 20 localized Yahoo! home pages around the world, including www.yahoo.com, where users are invited to upload text, images, video, audio, or drawings free of charge. The time capsule site will take users' contributed multimedia content and weave it into a single piece of digital art online.

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 to 27, 2006. Yahoo! has chosen this symbolic UNESCO site because of its role in the preservation of ancient culture.

Following the screening, the time capsule will be saved onto a digital archive, sealed, and later to be opened at Yahoo! corporate headquarters on the company's 25th anniversary in the year 2020. More information about the Yahoo! Time Capsule can be found at timecapsule.yahoo.com.