By Kathleen McGrory
McClatchy Newspapers
(MCT)
MIAMI - Danny de Zayas, 24, and his girlfriend, Nina Barry, 26, weren't sure where to move.
So in the spirit of "American Idol," they let the public choose.
The premise was simple: De Zayas and Barry posted a list of 250 cities online. The first to garner 1 million Internet votes would become their new home.
The site, dannyandnina.com, went live in September.
By mid-December, nearly 5 million people had weighed in. De Zayas, a Florida native, and Barry were featured in newspapers and blogs around the world. The site propelled them to Internet stardom.
Now, it is propelling them to Denver. They move this week.
"It's been a romantic adventure for us," de Zayas said Friday from his Miramar, Fla., home. "We didn't know where we would be going, but we knew we'd be together."
De Zayas and Barry met four years ago at a nightclub in Manhattan. De Zayas, then an undergraduate at New York University, was the DJ that night. Barry, an art student originally from Moscow, was at the club with some friends.
The two spent much of the night talking about their shared love of music and art.
A few weeks later, de Zayas moved to Brooklyn. By coincidence, he moved one block away from Barry.
"We were inseparable after that," he said. "We were hanging out 20 hours every day. I had never felt that way about anyone."
Flash ahead to August 2006.
De Zayas and Barry were living in a small apartment in Brooklyn. Both had finished school. They were ready to leave New York but not sure where to move.
The idea to set up a Web site and let America vote hit de Zayas in the shower.
"At first, I wasn't sure how serious he was," Barry said. "He kept talking and talking about it. But when I finally sat down and thought about it, I realized it could be a lot of fun."
De Zayas and Barry assembled a list of 250 places to live. They chose a variety of cities from across the country, some big, some small. They put their picks on a website.
The pair also included some information about themselves and what they wanted in a city.
Visitors to the site could cast as many votes as they liked.
Hoping to attract voters, de Zayas and Barry sent out news releases to public officials and news outlets in nearly all 250 cities.
Then, they moved from New York to de Zayas' parents house in Miramar and crossed their fingers.
"We had no idea how people would react. We weren't sure if we would even get a thousand votes," de Zayas said.
The first 40 votes came from friends in New York.
Several days later, Jacksonville, Fla., became the front-runner. The city attracted several thousand votes after de Zayas and Barry were featured in the local paper.
That was just the beginning.
Tens of thousands of votes flooded the site over the next few weeks. Fort Collins, Colo., took an early lead. Then Fayetteville, Ark. Then Savannah, Ga.
"Every morning we would wake up and run over to the computer," de Zayas said. "We never knew what city would be in first place."
The site had become a Web sensation. More than 200,000 votes were streaming in every day. Teenage girls in Colorado and Indiana wrote to say they held voting parties in their basements.
In October, the popular German video blog Ehrensenf urged its audience to punish the pair by sending them to live in Plano, Texas.
The Dallas Morning News responded with a scathing editorial.
Controversy also ensued in late December, when South Bend, Ind., unexpectedly took the lead. Dozens of people criticized the city on the couple's message boards, advising them not to move there.
In the end, both cities were edged out by Denver. The Colorado capital reached the 1-million vote threshold in mid-December.
De Zayas and Barry will move Tuesday.
The Web adventure is not over. De Zayas and Barry will continue blogging about their odyssey for the next year.
Their fans will be waiting.
"A lot of people have really connected with our story," de Zayas said. "Everybody has moved. Everybody has been in love. People can really relate to what we're doing, even if we're doing it in an unconventional manner."
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© 2007, The Miami Herald.
Visit The Miami Herald Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.herald.com
Is 'Anyone Can Do It' Just A Marketing Schtick?
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