Via Mike Whybark: New Earth Time.
Their site goes into more detail, but in brief, timezones are a pain in the butt. As the ‘net connects more and more of us in real-time, perceived distances become smaller and smaller (my Flickr contacts page, for instance, has a few people scattered across the US and others in Luxembourg, Singapore, Johannesburg, Brisbane, and Tunis). Rather than having to deal with local time zones and the bother of constantly converting back and forth, NET is an attempt to standardize one global time system.
This isn’t the first time something like this has been put forward, of course. Mike referenced WRLD.time, which I’d not heard of before, and I remember Swatch Internet Time. These projects always interest me, though, and I’d be thrilled if this actually caught on.
Okay, well maybe “thrilled” is a bit much, but it’d at least fall into the “really nifty” category.
The NET site provides a couple different javascript clocks, and pointers to both Windows and Mac clock applications. The Mac software they link to is an old System 9 menu bar extention, so it’s not terribly useful under OS X — but as the JavaScript clocks look fairly simple, it strikes me that it shouldn’t be terribly hard to slap together a Tiger Dashboard widget (and, should such a thing be put together, it seems to be that it would be useful to include a converter, too…). Not that I know the first thing about doing that, aside from the very theoritical basics, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be very difficult.
Then, as long as I’m daydreaming, I wonder how hard it would be to hack around and automatically compute the NET time from the post time of each entry to include that in the dateline of each post on my site…