With the recent unfortunate loss of who some are saying was the greatest entertainer of all time, I have been intrigued by the outpouring of displays honouring the life of Michael Jackson.

When a colleague turned me onto the site Eternal Moonwalk earlier today, I was impressed not only by its creativity and mission, but importantly by its global reach and age range of collaborators.  The project was set up by a Belgian radio station, Studio Brussel, to encourage people from all walks of life to upload their own 10-second version of Jackson’s signature Moonwalk.  Submitted videos are aggregated and spliced together to form a continuously flowing Eternal Moonwalk.

In true 2.0 fashion, the project empowers fans to share their favourite uploaded Moonwalk video on any number of social platforms and capitalizes on the most popular web content for its “how-to” Moonwalk video from YouTube.

Snippets of different users’ uploads, and even their rehearsal videos, are now also popping up on the video sharing site.

Among the 000s of videos uploaded so far, there have been solo Moonwalks, group Moonwalks, corporate Moonwalks, Lego Moonwalks, cat Moonwalks, ballet Moonwalks, video game Moonwalks…Well, you get the idea.

Beyond the tribute, what I find quite fascinating about the eternal video are the tiny snippets of insight into people’s homes, workplaces and even into their wildly diverse personalities. While certainly not all contributors are doing so to honour Jackson (some are just enjoying the spotlight), I appreciate that the project allows people to reflect in their own tiny, yet symbolic way. Some videos are subdued, but most are quite happy and in sum, they demonstrate that Jackson impacted many people’s lives in his short 50 years.

The distance walked in each video is recorded and at about 2 metres/dance, I hope we reach the moon before gravity catches up and slows the project’s momentum. (That would be about 384,403 km, or 192,201,500 walkers.)