So Time Magazine has named me, and you, and the guy in the next cube over, as person of the year. In fact, we beat out whatshisname, the President of Iran - and we're not even building nukes.

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.

Money quote coming, wait for it...

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.

Now, lest you think that that's only an extended suicide note from the dinosaur media - which in a way it is - it's worth noting that they're a few years too late. This Web 2.0 stuff is by no means new.

Time Magazine never moves from the descriptive to the diagnostic in this piece - why is it that all of these citizen-driven technologies are making their life so difficult? I can't speak for the people who really needed to see Britney Spears' vagina, but when it comes to politics, here's a few pointers:

Stop it already with the process gossip. People aren't interested in hearing who candidate X hired. We want to know about more than horseraces. Stop wasting our time by, for example, crowning frontrunners today for 2008. You're missing the story, all the time. Tell me what the candidates, and the parties, are proposing that's going to make my life better, or worse. Stop giving me the he-said she-said drive-by of republican and Democratic talking points: tell me who's telling the truth. You don't need to be more partisan - though a little bit less flagrant Bush administration stenography would be appreciated - but for crying out loud, try honesty every once in a while.

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