Last year’s Person of the Year was a collective entity: YOU. This means everyone on the internet community who has contributed to what is called Web 2.0 . The selection marks the few times that a group of people is selected as their yearly honour, the others being The WhistleBlowers , The American Women and many others. It is very obvious why this is so, with the sudden boom of user created contents as opposed to contents supplied by the big shots corporates of last centuries. Think social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace and many others, social bookmarking sites (Digg, del.icio.us), torrents, blogs, photo sharing (flickr, Picasa) and videos (YouTube, JumpCut and VideoEgg) Nowadays I rarely browse static site anymore. Contents are dynamic, fluid and entertaining. You never run dry of information or news.
Check out the Two Chinese Boys, a pair of testosterone-charged young chinese boys who have way too much time in their dorm. They have their lip-syncing antics uploaded in YouTube as well.
With the plethora of cheap camera-phones and webcams, almost anyone can make an MTV nowadays. You’d better also see “Numa Numa,” which stars a chubby young man in his New Jersey bedroom lip-syncing to an insipid but weirdly catchy Romanian pop song.
News take on a different meaning with this revolution. We are no longer limited to what is served on RTM or TV3 or other terrestrial or satellite TV stations. Independent news are abundant online (Malaysia Kini, Jeff Ooi). The recent LDP toll hike protest was not covered extensively on normal newspaper, radio or TV network, rather they were abundant on those alternative news source.
Open source softwares are considered in the same revolution as Web 2.0 as well. It’s written by the community, for the community. I’m using Ubuntu on my laptop. I was influenced by a nerd back in my RHB days. Once I installed it, I never looked back. As soon as I get my ass off programming in .Net, I will format my desktop to Ubuntu as well.
Not all are a bed of roses in Web 2.0; it could turn ugly as well. In a well known case in South Korea, a modern day witch-hunt was launched against Dog-Shit-Girl who apparently let her dog do its big business on a train. The community immediately identified her and her university where she studied. She suffered immense humiliation and reportedly she dropped from the university.
Missed last night’s episode of SmallVille? No problem. Just point your torrent clients to any of the many torrent hosts and you can catch it in HDTV format, no less. Want to show your family in China how your baby girl looks like? Relax, upload it to a website and you’re good to go.
Not convinced? Then why are you reading my blog anyway?
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So give yourselves a round of applause and a pat on your back. YOU deserve it!
YOU’RE THE MAN!!!
Posted: 15th January 2007 by Jacky Yong in Computers, Current AffairsTags: man of the year
And since we’re on the issue of blogs, I accidentally bumped into this fiery blog of a youngster who writes witty but sarcastic blogs. Typical male chauvinist, angry teenager rantings who receives more hate mails than I do porn mails (and I do have tonnes of porn mails). So read on and enjoy his blog on my Interesting Reads.