TIME.com: Now It's Your Turn -- Dec. 25, 2006 -- Page 1

TIME.com: Now It's Your Turn -- Dec. 25, 2006 -- Page 1

Time's person of the year is You - those who toil bloging, mashing, posting, sharing, and ushering in the possibilities of social software and web 2.0. There is no image on the cover - there is a mylar insert that reflects the image of those who hold it up.

From TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel:
Posted Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006
"The other day I listened to a reader named Tom, age 59, make a pitch for the American Voter as TIME's Person of the Year. Tom wasn't sitting in my office but was home in Stamford, Conn., where he recorded his video and uploaded it to YouTube. In fact, Tom was answering my own video, which I'd posted on YouTube a couple of weeks earlier, asking for people to submit nominations for Person of the Year. Within a few days, it had tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video submissions and comments. The people who sent in nominations were from Australia and Paris and Duluth, and their suggestions included Sacha Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the YouTube guys.

This response was the living 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..."