Have you ever wondered what it would be like to pack up everything you own and settle down someplace completely new?
We’re Danny and Nina, and in September of 2006 we embarked on an unprecedented journey with the help of hundreds of thousands of internet users from across the globe. We wanted to move someplace new, but there were so many towns that appealed to us we didn’t know where to begin.
Then one day while taking a shower, Danny was struck by a simple thought: what if we let people vote on where we should live? After all, the experts on the subject were folks everywhere, people who had loved or loathed life in places nationwide. We came up with a list of 250 towns in the 48 contiguous states to give things a little bit of direction, created a website where any visitor could vote for their favorite as often as they liked, and pledged to move to the first place that received 1,000,000 votes.
About three months later, on December 16th, we had a winner after nearly five million total votes had been tallied.
From the beginning, we envisioned this project as an artistic exercise whose entire scope and shape would be molded by every person who visited our site. We may have been the ones who planted the seed, but the crux of the undertaking was based entirely by anyone who paid a visit and cast a vote, left a comment, told a friend, sent us an e-mail, accused it of being a hoax or a marketing gimmick, joined us on MySpace, or phoned us up for an interview.
When the dust had settled, it was clear that the project was an unmitigated success. Not only did it become popular enough to succeed on its most fundamental level (i.e. reaching the one million vote mark), but it received coverage from international media outlets and had become a vibrant, dynamic, and unpredictable bit of Web 2.0 history.
Please feel to poke around to learn more about the project, its inspiration, the voting results, as well as some of the ways we’re keeping busy these days.
xoxox
Danny+Nina