I have spent some time thinking about the impact of the Web on my life, and I have to say that it is a bit of a mixed bag. As a publicly private person, I try to only call attention to things of note, while I have family and friends that had different views on what to talk about and where to talk about it.

One place where I am very public is on webinars, and I want to make this offer to all the webinar companies: I will participate and help organize a celebration event of the Web’s birthday with each company, which I will then publicize to my lists and groups in order to give Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C (News – Alert) the recognition they deserve.

So how should we go about making this happen?

First, everyone should produce a “Happy Birthday Web Webinar” sponsored by…yourself. A one-hour session would generally break out as follows:

• 0-5, Introduction: Happy to help if asked, though I am confident you have your own.
• 5-15, How we got started:  Company executives should talk about their history on the web and how they got into the webinar business.
• 15-25, How we arrived here: Your development team should talk about the platform and any iterations they experienced.
• 25-45, Guests speaking on collaboration: Personnel associated with the best integration of your platform, and/or someone who works with/for the W3C on a specific subject.The Web is expanding and certainly our use it of continues to adapt and adopt.  So feel free to suggest areas you would like to point out.
• 45-60, Q&A

Once produced, we can post your “Happy Birthday” webinar to the webat25.org, Wikipedia, and to other pertinent sites. The goal is to highlight our history and to demonstrate our pride in it. This industry came out of one man’s awareness that information was getting lost in the piles of paper, and webinars are one of the best means we have for conveying that information.

So who is in?

US, LATAM, EMEA, Adobe’s (News – Alert) Breeze? Citrix, On24? ReadyTalk? Webex?  

I envision coordinating the “Happy Birthday” webinars for release on a particular day, to do it much like Peter Jennings and ABC did in ringing in the Millennial New Year. And if you are too young to remember that, that is all the more reason to reflect on our history!