Comments on: You against abominable people

By: Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 19:06:29 +0000

Guilty as charged of snarkiness.

But who is best positioned to cause much destruction and poverty? Heads of state, the POTUS being in a better position than most.

By: Yaron

Yaron — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 04:20:09 +0000

Fine, I should have known my two thoughts could have been given a snarky interpretation. How about this: “it’s very hard to have a significant impact on a lot of people’s lives. The easiest way is to be President of the United States. The second-easiest way is to cause a lot of destruction and/or povery.”

By: Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 04:50:51 +0000

Yaron, I’m not certain that the POTUS causes the most destruction almost every year, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Victor, Wikipedia is a better example than MySpace or YouTube (I don’t think NewsCorp or GooCorp makes much difference), but I still think the latter two are instances growing user control. I like Ed Felten’s take.

By: victor

victor — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:50:37 +0000

“It’s about the many wresting power from the few…”

remind me again, who owns MySpace?

By: Yaron

Yaron — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:19:12 +0000

It’s true that it’s much easier to have a great negative impact than a great positive one, I think for the simple reason that destruction is just a lot easier to accomplish than construction. That’s one of the inherent problems in the whole “person of the year” exercise - the other major one is that, in all honesty, the person who had the most effect on events in any given year is almost always whoever the President of the United States is at the time.

That said, and while it’s nice to finally be named person of the year, it’s a little presumptuous that a few tens of thousands of people creating online content at home represent all of us. I think a better choice might have been “Web 2.0″ as something like “technology of the year”; it certainly would have been less wince-inducing.