ABSTRACT

At the end of 2006, time magazine’s person of the Year was ‘You’. On the cover of the venerable US news magazine, underneath the title of the award, was a picture of a computer with a mirror in place of where the screen would normally be, in order to reect the face of the reader. Since the 1920s kings, presidents and popes had graced the cover, each selected for their unique contribution to statesmanship or world history during the preceding year. In 2006 however, the editors decided that the person who had contributed most was ‘everybody’, the ordinary people who were ocking in the millions to emerging, Web 2.0 services and making mass contributions to the Web. is was the year, it was felt, in which the Web was “bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter” (Grossman 2006, webpage).