December 18, 2006

Time Magazine Picks YOU as the Person of the Year

I'm not sure if Time Magazine simply didn't want to pick a human this year, but for whatever reason it chose "YOU" as the person of the year. I think it was a good choice. By picking "you", Time Magazine is really giving acknowledgment to social networking and the power of the individual to let themselves be heard by millions all over the world.

How does this differ from the Internet we've had for years?

The difference is that 10 years ago, about the only thing someone could do by themselves and not be an expert in was to create a web site. Even this process was not too easy. However, over the past few years and very recent months there are so many added tools on the Internet to make publishing anything you want - quite easy.

Time Magazine artfully explains and writes If web 1.0 was organized around pages, web 2.0 is organized around people. And not just those special people who appear on TV screens and in Op-Ed columns. Web 2.0 is made up of ordinary people: hobbyists, diarists, armchair pundits, people adding their voice to the Web's great evolving conversation for the sheer love of it.

If you're grumbling to yourself that this is just a bubble that will pass like the next one. You're wrong. Here's one reason from the Time article - Web 2.0 companies don't live large; they live small. Under the old model, start-ups took a ton of IPO money, then quickly burned through it by hiring too many people and supplying them with Foosball tables. Web 2.0 start-ups are monastic by comparisonóand the smartest of them get you, the user, to do all the work. Malik's commercial venture, a tech blog called GigaOm, has only four paid employees and no office. Malik works out of his one-bedroom apartment. When he needs to see his customers, he meets them at the nearest Starbucks.

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