Serendipity35

Congratulations on being named Time magazine's Man of the Year!

Yes, it IS you. They passed over the politicians, entertainers and thinkers and picked you.

This is the web 2.0 you and the user-generated content you.

I watched Soledad O'Brien last night on a CNN special about the "behind the scenes" negotiations at the magazine as they tried to decide who they were to choose. Funny that CNN assembled a group of bloggers to discuss their choices and none of them saw themselves as a possible winner of the title.

So, all that this blog has been talking about this year is stamped as pretty important by a pretty important magazine. Do I sound tepid in my enthusiasm? My own experience has shown me that teachers, students and especially the world at large is not as interested in all this as I or the readers of this blog seem to be.

Here's Time's take on their choice:

"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...

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..."

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