>If one were to attempt to "walk across the world", this would be about as close as they could get. :)
I know this sounds ridiculous, but I've sometimes fantasized about walking around the world and the best you could do in theory is about 10x the distance from New York to California: South America to West Africa (assuming you can cross a frozen Bering Strait). That's 20,000 miles. In reality, you'd probably face insurmountable political and legal difficulties with crossing borders.
I imagine you could do slightly better. Maybe from the edge of Siberia to the south of Spain, or Singapore to the north of Norway. Walking to London has a big obstacle in the way, the English Channel. I'm not sure how he intends to deal with that.
Edit: D'oh, you could probably do much better by ending at South Africa.
>Imagine if an American said he was going across the "world" from New York to California.
Imagine if they did it too. It would be quite mind expanding for people to see that not everybody lives like they do in California or Iowa or New York or Texas.
TV can only get you that far -- you have to experience it too. There are people in New York that are more provincial (in relation to the ways of the world) than people in Idaho, and vice versa.
Johnson hopes the walk will help create a name for himself in the Internet industry.
He wants to develop cross-platform Web applications that engage nations.
Not sure I could think of a worse way of doing this than spending 5 years hiking across Siberia.