One Million Giraffes Challenge the Internet

by Truemorist | August 24, 2009 at 10:32 am

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Before you proceed to read this article, do the following:

1) Put down your mouse
2) Pick up a pencil
3) Take a deep breath
4) DRAW A GIRAFFE!

In case you don't know, there has been an online buzz about creating your hand-drawn giraffes, thanks to one man's random idea to collect one million giraffes drawings to prove the power of the almighty Internet!

More than 130,000 giraffe drawings and models have already been submitted to OneMillionGiraffes.com over the course of merely two months. The web phenomena that has caught the attention of many Twitter and Facebook users actually was started as a rather innocent bet between two friends.

"We were just small-talking and discussed the Internet and how amazing it is. I proclaimed that anything is possible nowadays, there are no limits anymore, and said I could easily get one million of anything if I wanted to," Ola Helland, who lives in Stavanger, Norway, explained. "Jørgen refused to agree with me and said there was no way I could get one million giraffes. So we made a bet.

"Two days later I made the website almost as a joke just to play around with the idea. I posted the link on my Facebook and Twitter account thinking I would get 10-15 giraffes from my friends and then it would just die off. "I went out for lunch and when I came back I had 60 giraffes. By the end of the day I had 134. I started to realise that I had started something I immediately lost control over."

The rule of the bet is simple and easy: all giraffes must be created by hand. So don't cheat - quit your MS Paint and Photoshop and go ask for advice from your 5-year-old neighbor on how to draw a giraffe.

The deadline of the bet is the end of 2010. Having collected 134,227 giraffe drawings already in a little over two months, Helland is confident to collect the remaining 865,773 in the 494 days left.

If you are one of those cynics that want to write this whole idea off as a silly art project for people who have too much time on their hands, you might want to have a second thought.

"It's become a way of spreading joy and to get people to turn off their televisions and creating something real," he said. "I love getting emails from parents and grandparents telling stories of how they sat down with their kids and fooled around with crayons for a few hours. Drawing, laughing and sharing something real with the people around them really seems to bound people together."

In addition, Helland is working on getting a corporate sponsor to donate £1 to the World Wildlife Fund for every picture submitted. The money, of course, will be used to protect the new-born Internet star, giraffes!

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