You may have heard the term “Web 2.0″ bandied about in the last couple of years.

Steming from an O’Reilly Publishing conference a few years ago, “Web 2.0″ is a rather nebulous term referring not to actual changes in the technology, but to a shift in the way information is disseminated and accessed using the already existing technologies of the internet.

The idea encompasses “social media”, or networking sites, collaborative information resources like wikis, social tagging or “folksonomies”, online communities and, of course, blogs.

This aspect of the web has become most evident in relation to art in the creation of online artist communities, either broadly based, like deviantART, or more specifically focused, like the CGSociety.

Drawing Day is an event initiated by Mick Gow, a designer and artist who created the Rate My Drawings site, which uses a Flash based interface to allow users to draw online, view and rate others drawings and view the drawing process as a playback animation. Like many art community sites, it also includes a forum for discussions, one of the core features of social networking sites.

Gow has taken the ideas of social media and created an event meant to leverage the widespread dissemination of art across social networking sites into a focused, high profile happening with the simple theme of putting drawings by as many people as possible onto the web in a single day.

The stated goal is to get 1 million drawings posted onto social networking, art and image sites like Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, deviantART, MySpace, Amateur Illustrator an Rate My Drawings; and in the process raise awareness of art and illustration on the web.

It’s also, of course, another good excuse (and some of us need them) to put aside work and worries and devote some time to just drawing.

It sounds like great fun and costs noting to join in, just draw; and to actually participate, post your drawings somewhere (or use one of the online drawing tools if you have a graphics tablet hooked to your computer). Most of the community sites require that you create an account, but a lot of people already have one on Flickr or similar sites.

The Drawing Day site lists come of the community sites and describes how to upload drawings to each.

My current point of view, despite what my ninth grade math teacher thought of my activities in class, is that time spent drawing is never wasted.

Drawing Day is slated to be the first Saturday in June each year, and the initial event is this Saturday, June 7, 2008.

(Image above: Drawing Hands by M.C. Escher, see my previous post on M.C. Escher)