Back in October, I wrote about a column on blogs in Time Magazine that seemed hopelessly out-of-touch in its assertion that all blogs were written by clueless adolescents.

It wasn’t just that the column failed to recognize the well-informed and talented people who were writing many blogs, but that it was so ready to dismiss the influence those clueless adolescent publishers could wield by taking their collective voices to the masses, and the way this new media genre was affecting the way all of us see the world.

So needless to say, I thoroughly agreed with Time’s choice: You, for its Person of the Year, which argued that while many individuals could be blamed for all the disturbing things that happened over the last year, 2006 was also a year that saw “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.”

Whether or not you agree with Time’s choice of naming all of us as person of the year, the cover story is worth reading for the way it connects the dots between blogs and YouTube and Wikipedia and MySpace and Second Life and makes a convincing argument for how all of these things that might be dismissed as throw-away entertainment, are really changing the world.

One line that really resonated with the writer in me: “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.”

Time’s cover story also wisely discusses how all the changes brought about by Web 2.0 are not necessarily good. “Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom,” it notes, calling it a “massive social experiment,” and one that could fail.

Check out Time’s online edition and you can also see readers’ responses to the magazine’s choice for this year’s person of the year. I didn’t do a thorough count, but it seemed that most readers who wrote in would have preferred to see George Bush, or Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad named Person of the Year.

One reader chastised Time for failing to include in its notion of “You” all of the Americans who don’t visit YouTube or have a MySpace account, or generate any Web content.

Personally, I think that is sort of like dismissing the significance of Web 1.0 by arguing that not everyone has an Internet connection. —Andrea Orr