[...] America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And 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. [...]
[TIME.com]
A lot has been blogged on this subject already. The article may of been dated December 25th, but it was released a while ago, or so it seems to me. That’s the thing. On the internet I hear within hours of when something happens. I get the news, digest it and form opinion before TV even thinks of reporting it. Newspapers finally post articles and they’ve already made the rounds around the world. A Parody has come out before the White House even realizes it’s happened. This year has seen a huge growth in the number of blogs with Wordpress.com seeing over a half a million blogs registered that they’re hosting and currently they are the small hoster compared to Bloggers numbers (Though in this case quality over quantity).
In 2006 we saw the growth of YouTube to the point that broadcasters started actually freeing content enough to be shared online. Broadcast stations were stumbling over each other to get that new viral video out there, and more then one television series felt it’s effects. Communities sprung up around television shows almost become organisms in themselves as they started becoming fodder for the corporations to judge direction. In what seemed as firsts, large companies where listening to the people. Actually doing what they wanted as for the first time they could actually get accurate info back. Nielson must be reeling as I’ve always thought that those numbers seemed weird and more interesting programming started making it’s way onto TV. It’s become more diverse in some ways as the big studios realize there is more viewership then in certain locales.
As with the broadcast stations the news sources changed. Not only are online Newspapers gaining strength as more viewers go to them for the news. But the huge news distribution companies started changing as they sued not to be included in search results… only to change as the newspapers themselves found they lost readership and complained. But in the case of the AFP suing Google was a toss up as AFP backed off, Google gave up money and both say they won. But for those wins there have been losses as politicians still don’t get the internet write laws that end up getting egg on their face. In Belgium a judge who doesn’t understand how the internet works justified a lawsuit and even though there is a robots.txt exclusion built into the standard. Belguim news doesn’t exist any more. And in Austrialia the court and the politicos are even more idiotic with laws that may end up negating all search. In all these cases it’s the people standing up and complaining that has been causing change, getting the laws, court decisions changed. Even in Sweden a pirating website The Pirate Bay made a large ISP change its censorship and blocking of a website (allofmp3.com) by block all traffic from its site and the people of that ISP complained enough for them to remove that block.
Speaking of The Pirate Bay, the MPAA and RIAA suffered some losses including the shut down of The Pirate Bay and then soon after The Pirate Bay back up and better then ever. The legalities of it is murky in that the tracker is legal in Sweden… but they still tried to shut it down. The same as how AllofMP3 is legal in Russia (they pay copyrights to the Russian Association) but still the RIAA has been doing all it can to shut it down but the site keeps fighting and so far winning.
The Corporations and Politicos have tried holding the course. But things have started changing. We have Bill Gates saying that locked down media (DRM) is bad. We have Record Labels starting to allow MP3s to be legally sold. And for every case that is “lost,” there are many more won. And the reason for these changes are the “You”. All of us wanting these changes, wanting to be able to use what we bought, the way that we want. And also wanting the information/entertainment the way we want it.
This is the year RSS got huge. If people didn’t know about it before they do now. With Google Reader, and other not so mainstream RSS reader sites like my I Vant Info, plus standalone programs that run as Screensavers, in the task bar and just another programs people have started to read information (it’s not all news) from a variety of sources as soon as it’s published. And with everything from News Sites, Gossip Columns, Collaboration/Social News Sites (like Digg), Photo Sites (like Flickr), Video Sites (like YouTube) and also feeds for Television Shows on Peer to Peer Networks providing RSS feeds you can now have a variety of entertainment right at your finger tips. But I digress and there is enough info out there for another topic.
Tags: Blogging, Digg, flickr, Interesting, Internet, Irony, Legal, Movies, Music, RSS/Atom Feed, Society, Stories, Wordpress, YouTube
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