Times Person of the Year

As most know by now, the Time Person of the year is YOU. You in the Time perspective refers to OUR involvement in the participatory net (Web 2.0).

I do not typically read Time online so I am not familiar with their conventions for offering magazine content online. When I first tried some days ago, the articles were not available, but now it appears that most articles can be read without purchasing the paper version. This is worth a look – not because any of the articles concern educational topics, but because the discussion of Web 2.0 topics is useful to those interested in general Internet use.

The article I found most useful was a short piece by Jeff Howe (I could not find this article online). I tend to be attracted to useful ways of describing or categorizing complete phenomena. In keeping with the theme of YOU as person of the year, Mr. Howe described Web 2.0 as:

  • You make it – user-generated content
  • You name it – folksonomy (tags)
  • You work on it – crowdsourcing
  • You find it – the long tail

This system was then linked to specific examples of general categories – the entertainers, the tookmakers, the gatherers.

Blogged with Flock

Loading