Only furthering the hype surrounding Web 2.0, Time Magazine has named you the person of the year. In addition to naming YouTube invention of the year, the users of the internet have been named person(s) of the year. I have to agree with Time in that it is pretty remarkable what can happen as a result of people sitting down in front of their computer and spilling their minds.

As I wrote in my previous article, “Content Aggregators Are King of the Hill”, successful websites are those that can pull together content most effectively, especially user-generated content. Just last week the New York Times published an article “2006, Brought to You by You”, emphasizing how big of an impact user-generated content has had on the internet. The internet has been thriving for the past decade but for some reason the media has been covering web news more heavily this year. What’s the reason? In my opinion it has been the success of Google, who’s stock has gone from $100 when it went public two years ago to a high of $510 this year. Then this year, Google bought out YouTube, one of the kings of user-generated content. You can see the dollar signs flashing in people’s eyes with the monetary opportunities that the internet presents.

Why are so many people spending their valuable time creating content for others to read? Well, freedom of expression seems to be extremely powerful. Prior to the internet people didn’t have such easy access to content that they were actually interested in, and the major media conglomerates controlled our access to information. Now there is a plethora of content on any given topic provided to us by us. Share your knowledge with the world to further humanity, or post a video on you tube to show how much of a fool humans can make of themselves. Curiosity and voyeurism are truly the two driving forces behind the internet. Why let the mainstream media tell us what’s human when we can turn on the “YouTube” and see what’s really happening? In real-time we can sit and watch what people around the world are really doing … it truly is a revolution.