Congrats to You!

“But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. 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.” Time.com

I recently found out (in July, congrats Elisa) that Time's 2006 person of the year was ME, and well you too. It's the entire web community and rightly so. For all the while, while politicians huffed, while the news media droned on, while terror levels rose and fell, we were collecting. We collected ideas and published them on blogs, we collected videos and posted them, we collected information to build an evolving encyclopedia.

It is unbelievable to imagine the wealth of knowledge that lies beneath the url bar, just a google search away. With knowledge comes power and with shared ideas and culture comes tolerance. Take what the printing press did for promoting and preserving human thought and experiences, now multiply by 1,000, maybe 10,000. We are building the largest community in all of human history, and WE are all founders. Never before has information been accessed so rapidly and spread so widely. All have equal chance to contribute, express, and in this way, the web is the grand equalizer.

I am proud to be a part of such a grand and global human landscape. I am going to enjoy the rest of 2007 with new hope and pride in my fellow contributors.