You are famous. I am not sure if you realized that until this week when TIME Magazine put you on the cover (literally on the cover - it only took 6,965,000 pieces of Mylar). You are the Person of the Year. You contribute to YouTube, you blog about your life on MySpace, you post your vacation pictures on Flickr.

Why do you do that? You could answer that question by posting your own dissertation on wikipedia. To save you the time I can answer it for you: You frequent those sites to view content created by other people, and post on those sites to add your voice to the conversation either just for close friends or the world at large. Narcissus may have been enamored with himself, but the rest of us are more enamored with, well, the rest of us. Stated more eloquently, Metcalf’s law claims that the value of the network is equal to the square of the number of users of the network. Clearly the first person to buy a telephone saw his purchase became much more valuable when the second person bought a telephone and so on. Talking to yourself is overrated.

After all, the world of You is really the world of Us online. UsTube, OurSpace, don’t have the same ring to them? That’s what they are though, a worldwide virtual kibbutz that makes the internet more valuable. The internet today reminds me of Steve Wozniak’s US festival from the early 80’s, the marriage of music, computers, television and people has finally been realized. The Woz thought of it first, and named it more appropriately than TIME has today. The power of collective thought is much greater than the actions of any one person online. Web 2.0 has made online collaboration easy for the masses and has had the same profound effects as Woz’s decision to display pictures as well as letters on the Apple II - “I threw in high-res. It was only two chips. I didn’t know if people would use it.” Given the right tools You online became Us online, and we have all benefited because of it.

So grab a copy of TIME this week and take a long look at the mylar staring you in the face. For only with a paper copy of TIME will you be alone. If you read the article online you will just end up collaborating with the rest of us.