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TIME.com: Person of the Year: You –

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 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.

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.

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. And for seizing the reins of the global media,
for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for
nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the
Year for 2006 is you.

I thought this was very good. Go read the whole piece.

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