you

Time Magazine just named its person of the year – “you”, a nod to the new social web and the ways in which people are flocking to it and creating youtube videos, writing and recording songs, writing blogs, commenting on myspace and facebook pages, etc.



Here’s an excerpt:

“…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.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. 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 whole article with links to tons of other info/articles is here.

Now that Time has written about this topic, it looks like it’s 90% to mainstream. When my grandparents start asking me about it next week – “what is it with people and those computers? What’s a facebook?” – It’s definitely all the way there.