Shocking, and a great pick.
Anyone who creates content on the internet wins the award. Bloggers. Wikipedia. YouTube. MySpace. Tribe. If you're not doing it already, why not? You have a voice too.
Think about it HP'ers - the bubble blogs and their collective millions of readers beat the massively financed forces of the greedy builders. We are helping destroy the laughably-corrupt and soon-to-be disintermediated real estate profession and NAR. We helped change the misguided perceptions that were out there that homes were get rich quick schemes that everyone needed to get into.
And after the housing crash, the world will be better off. The day will come again when kids can graduate from college, put 10% down, get a 30 year loan and an affordable payment, and have their house be a place to live and raise a family. Not a lucky pull of the slot machine.
Housing is just one issue where the people took back the power. Governments will fall because of the bloggers (just look to the 2006 results for a shining example). The mainstream media will be forever changed. Corrupt companies and individuals will be outed. Pressing social issues that are being ignored today will be addressed.
Yes, democracy is messy, and so is the internet. But what was really ugly was the power left to a corrupt few. Power will now spread to the many. And nobody can stop it. Rise up. F*ck 'em.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.
It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do
December 17, 2006
HP'ers win the Time Person of the Year 2006 Award
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22 comments:
I'm glad I'm Times person of the year. I have made huge contributions to society this year. I'm working on a website that might revolutionize the internet. Al gore ain't got shit on me.Well got more work to do today.
God bless
Casey serin
Proudly fighting the corrupt REIC!
David
Bubble Meter Blog
It ain't over till it's over. The corporate state is fighting back to give favorable treatment on the internet to its own, to hell with the rest of us.
Just a few days ago the U.S. Senate voted down a bill to grant favoritism to the big spenders on the internet. It was a victory worth celebrating, but the forces of evil will be back. It took the credit card companies and the auto lenders 5 years to finally pass the Loan Shark Protection Act (mistakenly called "bankruptcy reform"). The TELCO companies can be counted on to be equally persistent.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/l7ako
Have a Look.
Short Bio (three pages) on the founder of Wikipedia, which will be deleted by the Orlando Sentinal two weeks from today. btw, St. Pete is in Florida's West Coast. The bubble sent him to Florida.
++++++++++++
His servers can offer you the world
Meet St. Pete's Jimmy Wales, a man trying to educate the planet with the help of Wikipedia.
Wes Smith | Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted December 17, 2006
PHOTOS
Jimmy Wales
ST. PETERSBURG -- -Rumors that Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales might be moving to Silicon Valley from his home here prompted two reactions from Tampa Bay business leaders.
1. "We can't let this happen."
2. "We didn't even know he lived here."
The founder of history's largest, free and questionably accurate online encyclopedia may be a major star on the World Wide Web, and he may hang with the elite of the Geek Universe, but Wales has been flying under the radar in slumberous St. Pete for four years.
http://tinyurl.com/y2gv7b
Keith, nice comments.
funny how you seem to think bloggers will be the thorn in govt's side. for all your efforts will be shattered by govt itself. Mcain has put into motion a bill to limit internet use and opinion by fining content providers. Newt gingrich has said the internet should not be allowed to fall under 1st amendment rights of free speech. the vise grip has been slowly turned tighter on the sheep and they still suck down their lattes.
just imagine a RE crash with trillions lost by agents and builders and citizens. now imagine if you will, the cause was "HP"... content provided by a fringe journalst which had no basis in reality just opinion and caused panic by his blatent glamoriziong and grandstanding from a foriegn shore. a "terrorist". an economic "terrorist" who spread lies and dis-information and feed the crash.
imagine... Mcain the next pres. Imagine... the interent as the enemy...
corp interest to limit info will dominate, free opinion like HP will be squeezed.
time had the top of the housing bubble as a cover story "ga ga over RE" as pictured here so manytimes. Now the top is "in" on bloggers and free speech, the Man of the Year is "YOU" bloggers will be held accountable for their postings. Newt and Mcain have started the process.
we will look fondly back on these wild wild west days of the internet.
Time has called the top. Again. by the 2008 election cycle, blogs will be taken to task onn every subject and be shut down for all purposes.
You have been warned.
Me, me , me! It's all about ME! And it's about $%#@! time! Now we're all just as important as Britney Spears' twat - wooohoooo what a country!
UNfortunately I am in agreement with ANON's post above...
See believe it of not Honika, Bork, FMW, Shak, Buzz and yes even Thinker are ---- ready ---- a cut above the rest.
Why - we spend time in dialouge...a continuous conversation related to life...we engage---verbally joust---and express our our unique ideas....
UNder the proposes new world order...ideas will become obsolete and it will be whatever the "establishment" says goes.
To wit:
"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Heart of Darkness: The Bush Cult and American Madness
Originally published in The Moscow Times, Oct. 22, 2004.
Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult – a cult whose god is Power, whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the goal of this will – undergirded by the cult's supreme virtues of war, fury and blind faith – is likewise openly declared: "Empire."
You think this is an exaggeration? A typical bout of "liberal paranoia"? Then heed the words of the White House itself: a "senior adviser" to the president, who, as the New York Times reports, explained the cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days of 2002.
http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com
To your rosy scenario don't forget to add: In 2007, cows will begin to fly.
NO, it is pigs and it has already happened.
Bush feeds the press.
Bush is a Power grabber.
Bush is in the Fed Banks Pockets.
IMO
Put that on the Conver of TIME.
George Orwell nailed it a long time ago. I prefer his prose to the technocratic bullsh_t from the paranoid left and the gun-totin' right:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever. ..."
With the help of Cisco and Microsoft, China is now developing equipment and software to monitor and police all IP traffic. That equipment and software will eventually be used by all governments.
When IPv6 is implemented, online anonymity will disappear. Every word posted and every link visited will be logged and stored by some intelligence agency.
It already is.
Re Anon on George Orwell.
Ahh Yes, he should be read more widely and mentioning him is timely. His essays and books are available online at:
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays.htm
Bloggers in particular seem to have naturally followed his precepts. I hope that continues. Here are two extracts from essays of his that show how bloggers have broken the mould, IMO, of course:
On "politics and literature" from the essay "Writers and Leviathan"
--------------------------------
I am not, of course, suggesting that mental dishonesty is peculiar to Socialists and left-wingers generally, or is commonest among them. It is merely that acceptance of any political discipline seems to be incompatible with literary integrity. This applies equally to movements like Pacifism and Personalism, which claim to be outside the ordinary political struggle. Indeed, the mere sound of words ending in -ism seems to bring with it the smell of propaganda. Group loyalties are necessary, and yet they are poisonous to literature, so long as literature is the product of individuals. As soon as they are allowed to have any influence, even a negative one, on creative writing, the result is not only falsification, but often the actual drying-up of the inventive faculties.
---------------------
On "politics and the English Language"
-----------------------
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
----------------------------
-K
A Reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:
Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."
Without fuel they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.
On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.
Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver. He was declared man of the year as the financial markets started to fail.
Someone should do a blog about the silver and gold price MANIPULATION by the US government. Less than 4 holders are net short over 200 million ounces of silver. So much for a 'free market'. If everyone went out and bought 10 oz of silver (If you have over 2 oz of silver you have more than your fair share) the price would explode.
I thought time fucked up big time when it named earth as the planet of the year....just goes to show you never think you've hit bottom there is always smothing worse possible
Keith,
You forgot the best part:
You (ok, we) beat out Ahmadinejad as Person of the Year!
PROMIS software is already in use and the pentagons Total Info Awareness black op is in operation. these two pieces use the latest in data mining and artificle intelligence to "predict" events. combine that with the vast ibm super computer network and the digital world (i.e. DOT traffic camera, sensormatic ceiling camera in "walmart" or such andthe ability to track currance serial numbers and data mine your IP address and what you have bought (that roll on bullion last week), then cross reference all your phone calls and they will find and confiscate your wealth.
It's an Amercian Revolution!!! Which could actually go global!!!
Wow! People waking up to fraud and deceit in real estate!!!
This is good news!!!
Most of the content that I create, I flush. Smells good, though.
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