올해 크리스마스날 발매되는 타임즈에 올해의 인물이 선정되었습니다.
바로 당신! 네 맞아요 당신입니다! ㅋㅋㅋ

얼마 전에 용훈이의 "그래요 저는 알바였어요"에서도 간단한게 설명하였지만 토마스 프리드먼의 세상은 평평하다에서 제가 가장 인상 깊었던 것은 아웃소싱으로 인한 글로벌라이제이션도 아니고 산업구조의 변화도 아니었습니다. 바로 인터넷과 컴퓨터로 개인들이 하나의 주체가 되어 세상에 영향력을 행사할 수 있고 조직과 대등한 힘을 발휘할 수 있다는 것이었습니다.

타임즈도 그런 생각을 한 것 같네요. Wikipedia와 같이 만인이 작성하고 만인이 편집하며 만인에 의해서 읽히는 그러한 백과사전이 자리를 잡았고, YouTube로 대표되는 UCC(user created contents) 서비스 역시 보편적인 것이 되었으며, 2006년은 블로그 서비스 사용자도 폭발적으로 증가했던 한해였습니다.

소프트웨어 업계에서도 얼마전 모질라가 미국 브라우저 사용자의 10%를 초과하였다는 보고가 있었습니다. 모질라의 개발자들은 너무나 많지요. 소프트웨어 업계에서도 바로 우리 모두가 올해의 인물이었습니다.

비록 아직 초기 단계라 그닥 인지도가 낮지만 PC-BSD라는 운영체계의 한국어 로케일(locale) 담당으로 참여한지 1년째인 저로서도 세상이 바뀌고 있다는 것을 느낍니다. 성공할진 모르겠지만 PC-BSD 운영체계가 한국에서 쓰여지고 있는 것을 제가 본다면 (저는 Mac OS를 즐겨씁니디만 ㅋㅋㅋ) 흐뭇할 것 같습니다.

아무튼 이렇게 모두의 참여와 공헌이 세상을 움직이고 있다는 것이 놀랍고 즐겁습니다. 고로 저는 올해 타임즈의 올해의 인물로 당신들을 선정한 것이 너무나 시기적절하고 올바른 선택이였다고 생각합니다.

여러분들 모두, 올 한 해 세상을 더 좋게 만드시느라 수고하셨습니다.

You -- Yes, You -- Are TIME's Person of the Year

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2006
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

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.

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.

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.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

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.

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious. From the Dec. 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine