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"Time Magazine has gotten all smart with us this year.  When naming their Person of the Year, they turned down dignitaries and celebrities in favor of the average man: you.  More specifically, they've decided that social sites like MySpace, Facebook and, most of all, YouTube have put individuals at the heart of the action.  Heck, they even manage to namecheck \"Web 2.0\", showing just how mainstream that annoying term is becoming.  \nThe article in the December 25th issue reads: \"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\".  The cover, meanwhile, features a YouTube Flash player with a silver space inside: maybe we're supposed to assume it's a mirror.  \nYou could argue that Time is overdoing the YouTube fawning: they've already named the video site Time's Invention of the Year, despite not really being an invention.  That said, the list of nominees doesn't deliver any obvious winners: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China's President Hu Jintao, former Secretary of State James Baker and North Korean's Kim Jong Il.  What's more, it makes for a positive story at a time when the conflict in Iraq dominates the headlines.  \nMeanwhile, YouTube just moved another notch up the hype curve, and it's hard to say when it'll stop.  Will YouTube ever peak, or will it replace TV over the coming year?  And once again, we're left wondering: why did YouTube make it, while all the other video sharing sites are a fraction of the size?  \nI think the answer is probably in Nisan's recent post How To Have An Overnight Internet Success Story: it was viral (via embeddable players), and it was one of the first to get the model right.  As a result, YouTube got all the press hype.  MySpace Video may in fact turn out to be bigger than YouTube on many metrics, but they'll never get the same buzz: the story of a massive site becoming a bit more massive by adding video is nowhere near as seductive as the little startup that took over the world.\nAnd speaking of awards, don't forget to make your nominations for the Social Networking Awards 2006!  You can do so by leaving a comment on that post or (if you want to get some referred traffic to your blog), write a blog post and trackback the nominations article."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/12/16/times-person-of-the-year-youtube/>