A WORLD'S FAIR FOR THE INFORMATION AGE

With the radio and town hall metaphors firmly established, we turned our attention to world's fairs. It seemed only natural with the Internet starting to boom to try and stage a truly global event.

A Phone Card in Taiwan

A world's fair seemed to be the perfect metaphor, but it took some work to apply this real-world tradition to a distributed Internet.

By the time we were through, the Internet 1996 World Exposition web site, distributed on 8 servers around the world in a "public park for the global village," received 5 million visitors from 130 countries. In-kind contributions from sponsors included the first DS3 over the Pacific Ocean and 2 terabytes of disk drives.

Throughout the year, a variety of events brought the fair into the real world. Japan decked the Tokyo's Harujuku District with banners and parties, Taiwan opened public computers in 100 locations, and the Netherlands brought the fair to street festivals. At the end of the year, a closing ceremony was held in Tokyo, where the fair archives were blessed by a Shinto priest and put in a time capsule.

URL: http://park.org/Cdrom/