Ok -- it's old news by now, but Time Magazine's giving the "Person of the Year" award to "You" should be of a lot of interest to policy and research and advocacy organizations, as it's about the rise of community and collaboration on the web. (And related - see the growth of blog mentions of "person of the year" in the Technorati graph following the announcement.)

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.

Time talks about the rise of the web as a vehicle for massive individual contributions, citing the familiar and the less familiar, such as YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs, FaceBook, Secondlife, Flickr, del.icio.us, user-generated content (UGC), open source software, citizen journalism, Web 2.0, and more.

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 tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. 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 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.

All this coming from a mainstream media outlet? Whew! And, as fits the award, here's some reaction from across the web, some excited, some sober, some nonchalant:

Time’s Person of the Year: Kudos and gripes / David Pennock. Nice (Yahoo-centric) overview commentary.

Time Magazine Person of the Year: You (Pass the Kool Aid) but Where Do You End and Mainstream Media Begin?, / Blogher - Marianne Richmond. "Oh, but they really like us or are they just sucking up?"


Time wins linkbaiter of the year award / Darren Rowse

It has always been us / Jeff Jarvis. "Well, I suppose I should give Time some credit for recognizing the power of the people. Only thing is, there’s no news here..."

Time’s Person of the Year: You(Tube) / Mashable. "Youtube fawning?"

Time's Person of the Year is You - a Silicon Valley fueled, Steak-frite eating You / ReadWriteWeb. "This isn't a 'revolution'. It's an evolution of the Web..."

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"person of the year"