I find it annoying when instead of picking an actual person for Person of the Year, Time Magazine takes the cop out route and picks either an entire group of people or an abstract idea. This year they are choosing You as person of the year for all of the individual person developed content on blogs, youtube, myspace, facebook ext. They should only go with this type of person of the year once a decade at the most, but they have already done The American Soldier and The Whistleblowers this decade. If they wanted to talk about user generated internet content and social networking sites, they should have gone with Tom Anderson as person of the year and put his ubiquitous myspace picture on the cover. If they want to talk more about abstract groups of people or concepts, they should just change it to story of the year.

             Personally I would have gone with Vladimir Putin for Person of the Year (and not for the right reasons). With Iraq and election talk dominating the news this past year, little attention was paid to Putin’s Russia slipping back into many Soviet Union like tendencies: Helping Iran build a nuclear reactor, Increasing military cooperation with China, tightening control over media and business, journalists and others critics of Putin turning up shot or more horridly dieing from Polonium 210 and other radio active killers.