Please, please... Thank you... you are all too kind... OK... you can stop clapping now... OK you can clap a little more.That's right, I have been named Time Magazine's Person of the Year... seriously! The only catch is that so has everyone else. In a major watering down of their yearly bestowment, Time has seen fit to mimic the everyone-is-special mindset of our youth soccer leagues and public schools by awarding every person in - presumably - the world with the title of Person of the Year. How does Time justify this? They are recognizing the fact that the Internet (and the people who use it) has totally changed the way we do just about everything: how we communicate, how we shop, how we get our news, how we study. One of the biggest innovations of the Internet has been the blogosphere, to which I make my own humble contribution with my continued publishing of Buckhorn Road.
These little information dispensers called blogs have slain giants. Just think about the fate of Dan Rather when he tried to pass off some fabricated National Guard documents in an effort to unseat our President. In no time flat, the blogosphere had pointed out that the documents were fake, and so was Dan Rather. Would that have happened before the Internet came along? Don't think so! How about the Reuters "fauxtography" from the war between Israel and Hezbollah last summer? I doubt that the mainstream media would have exposed Reuters in the pre-Internet era; it was the bloggers who did it instead.
When bloggers first came on the scene, traditional journalists derided them as people writing in their living rooms while wearing their pajamas; there is even a blogger news service called Pajamas Media. Now look at the number of journalists and other newspeople who keep blogs themselves. Look at how snippets from my blog (and others) have been featured in the newspaper of record for the city of Sacramento.
It's a whole new world out there, and I am proud to officially be a part of it.
Good Day to You, Sir
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