Faces from Earth

The SETI Institute recently started to collect messages:
People from around the world are invited to submit pictures, sounds, and text messages that they would want to send to other worlds. The project aims to foster a dialogue about what we should say to extraterrestrial intelligence, as well as whether or not we should be sending intentional messages.
I think this is a good initiative and lets people thinking of ourselves and humanity's place in the Universe - I believe sending messages to E.T. is a deeply human endeavour -, leaving the gray daily routine at least for a moment. However, I would like to see a furthering of the efforts into a really multicultural direction, e.g. using different languages.

Re this I am just wondering how much additional bias will be introduced by the exclusive usage of english - I am pretty sure that english speaking people from non-english countries who submit messages do not represent a fair sample of that country.

An international collaboration, in a concerted action, would be a great thing.

Another effort, but this time from Australia - and the messages will be sent to Gliese 581d - is Hello from Earth. Look for a wrap-up before transmission here.

It generated a lot of media interest, as you can read in the wrap-up cited above:
And what an extraordinary success it has been: we had messages from Afghanistan to Alaska, from Morocco to Macau - in fact, from all 195 nations and even non-nations like Antarctica and Vatican City (not the Pope as far as we know).

More than 1,000 newspapers, in scores of languages, reported the initiative and than 9,917 blogs around the world discussed it and linked to the site; there were thousands of tweets in French, Russian, Indonesian and any other language you can image.

Visitors to the site reached 254,620 in the 13 days the site collected messages, and visitors read 1.25 million pages; from messages left by participants to articles on exoplanets and astrobiology. So, again, the outreach power of messaging has been demonstrated!