TIME Magazine Person of the Year

Congratulations everybody! We made it!

Time Magazine elected everyone who contributed to the World Wide Web as its Person of the Year. Personally I think it is a great selection and a moment for us all to revel in our accomplishment, we did it! We did something that was substantial, meaningful and worthwhile.

Time says: "Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for 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, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that's what makes all this interesting. 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. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious." Time Magazine

I want to take my hat off to all the webmasters, blogsters, techies, and webbies. Congratulations, you are a part of what makes this world a phenomenal place. Your creativity, ideas and opinions have contributed to the intellects of a massive web of minds. Let's make 2007 even more meaningful, Lord willing, by making our presence online even more edifying and powerful. You go!