TIME Person of the Year: You

Yes You, the Internet user who actively generates content on the websites you visit (comments, uploads, posts) or on your own website or blog.

You are leading this digital age revolution. TIME and every other smart business reporter in the world agrees.

As do knowledgable marketers who realize that the future holds so many challenges to their brands, because every one of you will have a say!

TIME simply recognized the importance of the user generated content revolution. This comes following the massive successes, and buyouts, of YouTube- a video uploading site, MySpace- a blog and social network- and others. The recent announcement that MySpace has overtaken Yahoo in traffic, and the huge growth in the number of blogs worldwide, as anyone can see on Technorati.com- the world’s blog directory- which claims there are 55 million blogs.

And there are new trends emerging like Vlogs (video blogs), mobile blogging - yes on your mobile while you’re on the move- and so much more.

TIME says platforms for content generation, like YouTube and MySpace are "seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game."

To win this coveted honor, 'YOU' beat some tough competition this year for Person of the Year from the likes of Iran's President Ahmandinejad, China's President Hu Jintao, North Korean's Kim Jon Il, and President Bush.
In fact, on CNN.com and Time.com they were conducting a vote on these personalities. There was no sign of ‘You’, which made it such a pleasant surprise this week.

As TIME put it “Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion.

But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.”

The article goes on to say you “made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. You blogged about your candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. You camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.”

TIME editors are so excited about the prospect of an “explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.”

Very inspiring. I’m going to post on my blog now, then comment on blogs of some friends, then upload some photos on Flickr and a video on YouTube.

It’s just another day in the life of me and you.

Published in The Star
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