UN, Google, Cisco launch Millenium Development Goals website

Stuart Corner
Monday, 05 November 2007 10:15

Opinion and Analysis

Google's Michael T Jones, said: "It is our hope that the Millennium Development Goals and issues of human development will become more openly and frequently discussed, and we believe Google Earth and its users around the world can play an important role in making that happen."

Outgoing ICANN chairman, Vint Cerf in a statement posted this week on ICANN's web site ,  said: "As of this writing, there are only about 1.2 billion Internet users around the world. Over the course of the next decade that number could conceivably quintuple to six billion and they will be depending on ICANN, among many others, to do its part to make the Internet a productive infrastructure that invites and facilitates innovation and serves as a platform for egalitarian access to information. It should be a platform that amplifies voices that might otherwise never be heard and creates equal opportunities for increasing the wealth of nations and their citizens."

And a research company, Portico Research estimates that by 2008 half of the world's six billion people will own a mobile phone.

Never before have the world's citizens had this level of ability to communicate with each other, to comprehend directly the plight of people that the Millennium Goals aim to benefit, to see via Google Earth, how and where the earth is being deforested and destroyed. Whether they will use it is another matter. It would be a wonderful thing to see MDGMonitor clock up even a fraction of the popularity of MySpace, or Facebook.

Maybe if it were made more interactive and put people in touch with people instead of being dry statistics and indicators, it might have more impact.