Here I am in Brighton, on the first day of 2007, writing my first post to my own blog. Having before watched the phenomenon of blogging from a distance, I’ve always wondered whether anybody else would want to read what I had to say. Could it possibly be of any interest to anybody? However, with Time Magazine voting “You” as “it” for 2006, I am muchly encouraged. Further mind talk tells me that there is some content published in other media that one wonders whether it should have ever seen the light of day! But there is a demand for this, and so it continues to get written. And why not.

The interesting consideration about the Time “persons” of the year is that for once the general public gets a vote, a nod so to speak. The people have been voted to represent the newsmaker of 2006. What Time Mag actually celebrated was the small contributions made by many to create a whole new kind of community style web experience, providing free knowledge, entertainment, education etc. to each other. That’s quite a groundswell and it will be interesting to see how it develops further. I have wondered for a few years now what, after the mobile telephone, could be the next big thing to arrive. This could be it and it will be great fun to watch what happens. After all, I can already hear the panicked breathing of all the media moguls who have started, more or less successfully, to charge for content! And the lawyers are already rubbing their hands in glee at the outrageously high mountain of fees they will make on copyright infringement cases.

Of course in retrospect, and isn’t hindsight great, it makes perfect sense. When I first read an article on The Long Tail theory a light bulb went on – actually more like a sport stadium’s lights. And Wikipedia’s entry spells it out beautifully in that “the total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items”. With other words every blogger, like myself, out there has a potential audience and the sum of that audience could be bigger than any large online media’s web presence could count, hence the clever recognition by Time Magazine of the power of this community.