Darren Herman

If you’re an avid reader of the Web 2.0 blogosphere, you’re probably sick of reading about the response to Time Magazine’s Person of the Year… you.

I was debating whether or not to write about about this article as I wanted to avoid repetition but wanted to voice my own opinion. I am extremely excited that such a major magazine and honor has been given to the consumer generated media world. The issue though is that it’s been happening since the inception of the Internet. Web content and publishing services (Geocities, Homestead, FortuneCity, Tripod, Six Apart, etc) have all allowed for consumers to generate and publish their own content and have been around since the inception of the Internet. The “You/Me” in all of this has been around since day 1, but I guess ~15 years later, we are finally recognized for our contribution to society.

I have read a few different blogs that have approached the subject and have to agree with Don Dodge about his thoughts on Web 2.0. For those of you who haven’t read Dodge’s posting, you can view it here. In his posting as it related to the Time article, he notes 5 reasons why the Internet “boom” is different this time:

- Pain
- Profit
- Bill Gates
- Food
- Burn Rates

I particularly like his thoughts about pain. During the first boom, you may have noticed that almost every dot com tried to go public (that’s a stretch, I know). Once a company goes public, it’s shares are publicly traded on the stock exchanges so every day consumers are allowed to invest in a company. When the bust occurred, the actual consumer who invested into the company (thru purchasing stock) was hurt… and sometimes badly. During the current boom, Dodge talks about how this current boom is funded by major media companies and VC’s and the pain of the boom will be confined to a confined space and not passed along to the general public.

Some other good takes on the article:

GigaOm