Matt Danzico, a 2005 graduate of the School of Communication, will spend this fall learning to make beer in a basement bathtub in El Paso, Texas, snowboarding with a stranger in Vail, Colo., and working a day on a professional wrestling tour in the Midwest.
Danzico is the founder of Around America in 2.0, an Internet-based film project in which he will travel around the country for 80 days, relying on strangers to volunteer to feed, house and transport him. He will then turn the experiences into a weekly Web television show.
Danzico, currently a reporter for in the New York bureau of the Japanese newspaper the Tokyo Shimbun, created a video asking for volunteers and posted it on three Web sites, including YouTube and blip.tv. He also created his own Web site, www.aroundamericaproject.com, where he explains the project in greater detail.
Danzico started his project to explore whether the connections made over Web 2.0 sites like Flickr, MySpace and Facebook can be translated into trust and connections in real life, he said. Web 2.0 is a term for how the Internet is evolving and refers to how users can more easily generate their own material.
As of July 31, the video had been online for two weeks and Danzico had received 25 volunteers. He had to turn down some volunteers because many lived in the same city - and because a few e-mails led him to believe they could be dangerous or simply creepy, he said.
Because one of the goals of the project is to explore whether relationships built online can be translated into real relationships, Danzico said he will not stay with any friends or family along the way, even as backup.
In addition to the Texas beer-maker, Vail snowboarder and pro-wrestling tournament, Danzico has received offers from an online video comedian who wants Danzico to join him on the road and a sorority in Moscow, Idaho. Someone else, an immigrant from the Middle East, wants Danzico to document the immigrant experience in the United States. One man in D.C. offered to transport Danizco to his next destination in a homemade airplane that Danzico said "looks like a hang glider with sheets and a motor."
Danzico will need about 52 volunteers to help him along his route, which will take him west from New York City to Oregon; south through California; east through Arizona to Georgia; and finally north through South Carolina before arriving back in New York, according to his Web site. The full route is available on Danzico's Web site.
The proposed route is flexible; Danzico has already changed it once to go farther south into Utah than he had originally planned. Anyone anywhere near the proposed route who wants to be involved with the project should e-mail him to volunteer, Danzico said.
Danzico does have some emergency money saved up in case he gets stranded, but otherwise plans to spend no money, he said.
He has recently begun thinking about sponsorships and may take some in the form of video equipment, but he does not plan on taking any monetary sponsorship because he said he feels it would compromise the integrity of the project.
Other bloggers have tried similar projects in the past. The Hometown Invasion Tour, www.hometowninvasion.com, aims to visit all 50 states in the United States. Its founder, Justin Sailor, has visited 45 of 50 states and, as of July 30, was in Pittsburgh, according to Sailor's Web site.
Danzico also said he had always wanted to "travel around the United States without spending any money and write a book investigating hobo culture."
Ultimately, though, something much more practical influenced his decision to start the project.
"The lease on my apartment was up, and I thought, 'I better think of something to do,'" he said.
