Person of the Year? It’s you

Time Magazine’s annual Person of Year takes a neat turn in 2006 by nominating You this year.
According to Time’s Lev Grossman: “The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
“But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story .. it’s the 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.”
That's what makes all this so 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 six billion.
Come 2007 will blogging and social media sites make a difference? I don’t know. Do you? Now is the time to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician but citizen to citizen, person to person.
At LeWeb3 the parting shot from the conference was a positive one – blog for a better world. That’s what I am going to do – cheesy I know – but each week I hope to post a comment on changing the world for the better. Whether that’s by random acts of kindness or pointing out injustices in the world. Will it make a difference – it’s not sure but if enough of do it… so join in the conversation.