If it can be said that there's a theme running through this OneWebDay celebration this year, it's "let's actually use this thing to change the world," as OWD founder Susan Crawford put it to me this afternoon in New York City's Washington Square Park where just under a hundred or so people gathered to celebrate the global network. Praising the seemingly useless iPhone beer app, Harvard Law School's Jon Zittrain joked that he saw OWD as the "celebration of the fertile crap" the Internet produces -- crap that fertilizes the web's "goodness" without much caring which is which. That's long been the web ethos: let's throw everything we've got to the wall and see what sticks.

But what was striking about today's event was the put-up-or-shut-up feel to it all. In other words, it's time, it seems, for the fertile crap-generator to start producing concrete change in the real world.

To be sure, some are putting up. Future Melbourne, Susan points out to me, marks that Australian city's turn to wiki technology to draft a civic plan for where it heads next. And Pandora's Tim Westergren described how Internet radio lovers flooded Capitol Hill with faxes when faced with increased royalty rates. But the web has been enjoying a reputation of being like a kid that "has potential." The moment has come for it to start living up to it in concrete ways -- even in the eyes of OWD's speakers, Internet evangelists all.

Grateful Dead lyricist and author of "A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" author John Perry Barlow described a "donut" that lay at the center of the Dean campaign in 2004. There was a ring of innovators doing things with the Internet that the world had never seen. Then there were people doing the boots-on-the-ground door knocking. And never, really, did the twain meet. The largely unspoken subtext today: that election '08, and in particular the efforts of the Obama campaign, will mark the death of the donut of disconnect.

Speaker after speaker called this a time for action, something of a challenge to the tech utopianism that, frankly, can sometimes run through these events. Jon Zittrain framed it this way: "We need to take ownership for this collective hallucination called the web" -- especially, as he put it, "now that cyberspace has annexed the real world." (Other speakers included media activist Dharma Dailey, Rocketboom's Andrew Baron, and One Laptop Per Child's SJ Klein.)

Larry Lessig remarked of the future and power of the Internet, "until we get this debate above 20th or 25th in the public awareness, we've never going to get anywhere." Larry's nascent Change Congress movement is, of course, a fairly direct attempt to use the web to reinvent the nature of American politics. "It's time," said Larry, "the virtual gets used to fix the real."