It's always a guess as to who ends up being Time's Person of the Year and almost every year the choice is both surprising and accurate. This year - it will come as no real surprise to blogreaders - it is you:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

It has been in the making for a few years, but 2006 marked the end of the century of 'big'. We're now into the age of 'small', open source, do it yourself, whatever you want to call it. Whenver I get asked (or ask myself) why I keep blogging, this revolutionary trend is essentially the answer.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey is unimpressed:

At least, however, they made a decision and selected someone. The entire point of a Person of the Year is to acknowledge that some people play larger roles in history. Naming all of us may make us feel good about our anonymity, but in the end it's either pandering to millions of readers or a refusal to take a stand on anyone. Choosing everyone is an abdication on the entire purpose of the project.

They didn't choose everyone, they picked a phenomenon that allows everyone to generate content. Looking around the blogosphere I get the impression that no matter what Time would have picked they would have received a gratuitous bashing from the 'unimpressed' crowd. More instructive is Paul Kedrosky's warning:

" ... from a financial perspective this has to mark some sort of near-term market top for user-generated content, blogs, social networks, me-media, etc "

Probably.

In what may be a first, Germany has decided to start charging a licence fee for using the internet to access TV and radio programmes. And that relates to internet access only, what logically follows is that governments will eventually want to have a chunk of the ever increasing amounts of real cash that change hands in online virtual worlds. Let's see what revenue hungry country moves in first.

Well, I am not the only one who has figured out that business air travel is slated for some major disruption in the form of open source air travel or by simply staying at home and conduct meetings from a safe and convenient distance. Paul Kedrosky and Seth Godin argue that air travel has indeed reached a tipping point.

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David Frum is not very happy either and labels the increased security measures around airports as perverse, as indeed they are. Of course, he has considered a solution:

Another approach: Perhaps if you fly often from New York to London, you might be willing to volunteer a whole mass of information to British Airways in return for a "trusted traveller" card that will allow you to walk on the plane with minimal fuss. Your name might be Omar Abdullah, but if they know that you are 57 years old, director of the Middle East collection at the Metropolitan Museum, own an apartment in Manhattan and a brokerage account at Merrill Lynch, carry a Visa card with a $50,000 limit, fly to London six times a year with tickets paid for by the museum, and so on and so on ... well, they can pretty confidently let you on the plane with minimal formalities.

Nice idea, but it only addresses a part of the problem and I can already picture the abuse and the rapid proliferation of forged “trusted traveler” cards. In the meantime, innovation in the airline industry proceeds swiftly, here is an example of one that has venture finance backing and this one in particular appears to be addressing the affordability aspect:

The Eclipse 500™ is the revolutionary twin-engine jet that's making private jet ownership a reality for more people than ever before. Through innovative technology, modern manufacturing techniques, and pricing models aligned with the high-tech industry, the Eclipse 500 is the lowest price very light jet (VLJ) available, yet features more performance, lower operating costs and the most advanced avionics and electrical system in its class. If owning a jet has been your dream, wake up and smell the jet fuel.

For a mere $1.5 million it's yours, no kidding.

Well, the increased security measures are starting to border on the ridiculous, the notion of having to check in your laptop and even the thought of going transcontinental without a book is just absurd. As I mentioned yesterday we adapt and improve, and we will, but it may well be that in the age of open source there is now a good chance of a fundamental restructure of business travel where the use of small jets or shared leases by a group of companies has good potential to replace the ubiquitous struggle to get on a big ticket commercial airliner.

Business travel has always been somewhat over the top in my opinion, I recall a Hong Kong to Washington, DC, flight where I had to attend a morning meeting that could well have been conducted by way of a conference call. The trip had entertainment value as I got to spent an extra day taking in the DC sights, but the cost-benefit ratio was totally off the charts. And that was in 1999, now with even better, faster and cheaper communication tools at hand there is a compelling argument to improve the bottom line by reducing corporate trips. And post-jihad travel will probably add another signifcant cost by adding longer waiting times at check-in and reducing efficiency if you can no longer use your laptop in the cabin. Not to mention that other cost-benefit analysis where the upside of closing a new deal will have to be weighed against the probability of being blown to smithereens by the jihadist sitting next to you in 5C.

In all seriousness, in an age where we move to smaller, independent and often non-corporate solutions – there’s a guy who wrote a book about that - we may well enter an age where small private jets will no longer be the provenance of the rich and famous. Creative financiers and risk takers will no doubt find a model whereby business travel can increasingly be channeled through small operators that operate light jets and who can offer their clients tailored flight plans. Too bad that Airbus failed to figure that out:

NOTE: Innovation is not something we're going to get out of large airline companies. But rather than confiscating books, cellphones and bottled water they may want to give it a try and consider alternative approaches:

Rafi Ron, former head of security at Tel Aviv, Israel's Ben Gurion Airport, said screeners should focus more on finding suspicious people than on hunting for potential terrorist tools.

"It is extremely difficult for people to disguise the fact they are under tremendous amount of stress, that they are going to kill themselves and a lot of people around them in a short amount of time, and all the other factors that effect their behavior," Ron said.

Makes sense, doesn't it?

My sentiments entirely.

Although most of the people I work with carry the damn thing, I personally have no use at all for a Blackberry. The laptop and cell phone give me sufficient access to the world and, quite frankly, I really don’t need to improve people’s access to me. Given the choice I’d rather reduce it.

Anyway, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been following the Blackberry patent infringement case which is quite interesting and Dan Morgan argues why in the wake of this affair the US will need some patent reform. He may be right about that although I will argue that a reduced ability to patent new ideas will adversely affect investment in new technologies.

Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pentagon chief said today's weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

[ ... ]

He lamented that vast media attention about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq outweighed that given to the discovery of "Saddam Hussein's mass graves."

There is no shortage of bloggers to help Rumsfeld getting his message out - I can think of a few - but it seems to me that among the major blogs that have a general pro-US and pro-GWOT position, practically none of them are reaching a broad and international audience. Even this blog, which has a decidedly international focus, gets some 65% of its visitors from the US, 15% from Canada, followed by Britain, The Netherlands and Australia who together capture some 12%. If Rumsfeld wants to spread the word beyond the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence he has to discover a way that allows him to penetrate a linguistically very diverse universe. If he cracks that barrier, it would be a huge boon for the entire blogosphere which loves to grow and expand its readership globally.

The other part of the Rumsfeld lament is not so much content-driven messaging, but the actual jihad that takes place in cyberspace. There the enemy has had a distinct advantage for some time, most notably because a lot of the counter-terror measures taken by the west never took account of their futility in the presence of the enemy’s technological savvy. Deporting a radical imam because you want him to stop influencing disoriented Muslim youths in Europe is not terribly effective if they are getting their orientation online.

UPDATE: Here's the full text of Rumsfeld's speech, via Dan Drezner.

And no, that's not a philosophical question.

PhysicsWeb has the answer.

We've been a little obsessed with the election here at Peaktalk, (okay, I have). So here's something completely different. An idea I genuinely hope can work: CarHarbour.

Right now it's just vapour-ware. But the idea is so simple. Identify an unused parking space (like your driveway) to a central server, and let people pay for it with their cell phones. (Description from TechCrunch.)

I can already spot some issues (payment enforcing, time limits etc.), but the implementation seems straightforward. Considering the interesting things people can do with the Google Maps API, I can easily envision a web-enabled cell phone where you can check for available spaces based on your location. And there wouldn't be any issue while it was still getting going. Even while inventory is low, if checking for available spaces is quick and easy, there's no downside.

File under 'Damn, why didn't I think of that?'