TIME Names 2006 Person of the Year and it's ME!!!

TIME magazine began its annual tradition of naming a "Person (nee "Man") of the Year" in December of 1927, when, as recounted in Isaiah Wilner's The Man Time Forgot (p. 199), the editors found themselves confronted by a slow news week and stuck for an idea for a cover story. The first person recognized was Charles Lindbergh, who had become a national hero and media darling following his celebrated and groundbreaking trans-Atlantic flight earlier that year, yet had not previously graced TIME's cover.

From its perhaps inauspicious beginning as simply a way to fill space in the magazine, Person of the Year has grown into an institution that has endured for eighty years. Many have come to think of Person of the Year as an accolade, but the basic idea was, and remains, to "highlight...the individual who most influenced events in the past year"(Wilner, p. 199) whether for good or ill. With that mandate, past Persons of the Year have included such villains as the Ayatollah Khomeini, Adolph Hitler and the Personal Computer.

TIME's 2006 Person of the Year, as revealed in their December 25 cover-dated issue, is: You. You and me and everyone we know, for, as the cover copy declares: "You Control The Information Age."

Specifically, TIME means the millions of us who post videos to You Tube, spend hours on MySpace, and blog, contributing to what is termed Web 2.0 and changing the way we get news and information, interact with others and view the world around us.

Therefore, as a blogger of absolutely no note, I--Ray Tomczak--am a Person of the Year. With that accomplishment under my belt, if I could get the editors of PEOPLE magazine to stop passing me over for "Sexiest Man Alive" year after year, I'd be a truly happy man. (C'mon, look at that pic over there on the right side of the screen. That, my friends, is a photograph of a very sexy, sexy man if ever there was one.)