Congratulations! 'You' are Time's person of the year
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Your support makes all the difference.Previous winners have included Adolf Hitler, Bill Gates and Ayatollah Khomeini. This year it was you.
Time magazine has named "You" as its Person of the Year in recognition of the way that ordinary internet users have revolutionised the media through blogs, file-sharing and websites such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Myspace.
"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," wrote the magazine's technology writer and book critic Lev Grossman.
"You" beat rival candidates including the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and James Baker, the former US secretary of state who co-chaired the Iraq Study Group.
By contributing articles, videos, and diary entries to user-generated websites, ordinary internet users have shown "a community and collaboration on a scale never seen before", wrote Grossman.
"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," he wrote .
MySpace - bought last year by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m (£297) - has more than 130 million users around the world and adds around 300,000 members a day, while YouTube - bought last month by Google for $1.65 billion - gets about 100 million daily views. "These blogs and videos bring events to the rest of us in ways that are often more immediate and authentic than traditional media," wrote Time's editor, Richard Stengel.
"Journalists once had the exclusive province of taking people to places they'd never been. But now a mother in Baghdad with a videophone can let you see a roadside bombing or a patron in a nightclub can show you a racist rant by a famous comedian," he said.
Time has been naming its person of the year since 1927, often provoking controversy with its choice of winnner, such as Adolf Hitler in 1938 and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Last year the joint winners were Bill and Melinda Gates and the U2 frontman, Bono.
The aim is to pick "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse".
The latest issue of the magazine, published today, features a mirror on the cover "because it literally reflects the idea that you, not us, are transforming the information age," said Mr Stengel.
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