Time's Person of the Year is Me! (and You)

Its like looking into a mirror… well at least a digital version, and I am the Time Person of the Year… and so are you (if) you are enjoying the web these days.

In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter…It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.

A revolution eh? Alright! We have been overdue for a revolution anyway. It may not be what Thomas Jefferson had in mind but it is changing the way people feel free to share ideas express themselves and feel like they are making a positive effect on the world. Anyway who else would you have had as the 2006 Person of the Year, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or North Korea’s Kim Jong-il? Seems somewhat apocalyptic to name one of those fellows.