You: Time's Person of the Year and What You Should Be Doing About It

We've been saying it all along, the Internet is undergoing a "You-Revolution," and now Time Magazine just took a big yellow marker and underscored it! By declaring "You" as the Person of the Year, with your face reflected in it's Mylar/mirrored computer monitor cover, You are the winner, but also the loser unless you get into action...

What does this mean to you as an Internet marketer or small business person? It means the Internet is officially your domain. The Web just got a whole lot easier to use for the average person. It's been evolving that way for the last couple of years. Now would be the time to get your business on the Web in a way that attracts and interacts with your clients.

The Blog Squad has been humming this tune for the last 2 years or more (www.buildabetterblogsystem.com, www.buildabetterblogservice.com, www.blogtobook.com)... Can The Blog Squad and Time Magazine both be wrong? One of us maybe, both probably not.

Here are a few paragraphs about the Time Person of the Year announcement and what it means:

From Richard Stengel, managing editor Time:

"...example of the idea of our 2006 Person of the Year: that individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy. From user-generated images of Baghdad strife and the London Underground bombing to the macaca moment that might have altered the midterm elections to the hundreds of thousands of individual outpourings of hope and poetry and self-absorption, this new global nervous system is changing the way we perceive the world. And the consequences of it all are both hard to know and impossible to overestimate."

From CNN.com:

"But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

"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.

"America loves its solitary geniuses -- its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses -- but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at 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.

"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."

Comments

[Rhea]

So, it really is all about me. I mean, us.

[John Easton]

Ms. Wakerman and Ms. Krakoff:

Thank you both for following this story and adding your insights. I want to jump in as member of the collaborative marketing community.

It is so timely that the magazine came out with this article. You two have been pushing business blogging and other collaborative opportunities; Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba just released their book, Citizen Marketers and there is so much buzz around the phenominon.

I am looking curious to see what we all create.

John Easton

[Patsi M. Krakoff]

Yes, this is the first time this new Internet revolution ("Web 2.0") has been recognized with force and fanfare... To me, finally the Web is doing what it was supposed to have done all along – make it easy for people with like interests to find each other and build collaborative communities. Hopefully, it will wake up a few business people and get them to thinking, "how can I join in and make this work for me?" Thanks for the heads up on the book, sounds great.