Forget all that negativity you've heard about the Web.
Tuesday is "Back the Net" day, when people can take a stand for cyberspace and boycott offline concerns.
Web visitors are encouraged to take an action online--buy something at their favorite e-commerce site, give to a charity through iGive.com or send an electronic greeting card through Blue Mountain Arts. Those who feel most passionate are invited to ignore offline means of shopping and communication.
The campaign is the brainchild of Michael Tchong, founder of online media company, Iconocast, San Francisco.
"The idea is to send a message to market watchers that the medium is as powerful as it was forecast to be," Tchong said. "Most people seem to have forgotten that all of the intrinsic values that everybody banked on in 1994 still exist," Tchong said. " It's still incredibly measurable, personalize-able and has worldwide reach. All of these intrinsic benefits have been overlooked in the jihad of dot-com failure."
Iconocast's Web site, (http://www.iconocast.com) features 26 companies that are taking part in the campaign by offering discounts or other incentives to encourage people to take an action online.
For example, Excite is donating $1 up to $10,000 to Schools Online for every e-mail greeting card sent through the company it owns, BlueMountain.com. Software company McAfee.com is offering discounts to anyone visiting its site on April 3.
The Back the Net date was chosen because it is the anniversary of Nasdaq's worst loss since 1998. But what people forget, Tchong said, is Web usage is up and the number of worldwide users is 350 million.
"Those figures should tell you that the whole abandonment of the Internet business climate is inappropriate," Tchong said. "There were some failures, but that shouldn't spoil it for the rest of the bunch."
A viral e-mail campaign sent to Iconocast's 50,000-name newsletter house file was passed along 5,000 times, Tchong said.
He will measure the success of the campaign based on how much visits to Web sites spike.
