You & I

the 2006 as a year is drawing to the close and its time to reflect on the year gone... on what have we achieved and lost as we (time) progressed... its also the time for the media to come up with their lists of the year's top things.. Time.com are the first to come up with the person of the year this year they have named 'You' as the person of the year... Yes 'You'... all those people who have made the web2.0 the most happening place.. be it the kind of innovation, the collaboration.. the sense of getting yourself heard... the community-ship that spans all the people of the world...( not all people, but all connected people..) thats a huge achievement given that just 15 years back only a handful of people had anything like email... we have surely come a long way... and 2006 will be a watershed & all this would not have been possible without the content creators... the creators of the videos,blogs,myspace profiles,flickr albums ,orkut profiles.. and other community based forums.... creators who did not sit in flashy studios or wrote in victorian english.. but people with their home-made videos.. their occasional personal logs.. their personal lives... people like you & me...

[...]

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.

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.

[...]

~London Calling~