You are Time's Person of the Year

New Delhi: Who according to Time magazine is the driving force behind the present information age? It’s 'You'!

Time will release its 'Person of the Year' issue on Monday, featuring a mirror in a computer screen on the cover.

The magazine has chosen 'You' as the Person of Year over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korea's Kim Jong II and former US Secretary of Defense Ronald Rumsfled, who hogged headlines throughout the year.

Time’s move was inspired seeing the power that individuals enjoy through blogs and sites like YouTube and MySpace, which allow people to air their opinion.

Time clarified that at the same time, there were individuals they could blame for many painful and disturbing things that happened during the year.

The conflict in Iraq became worse and a vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon.

A war dragged on in Sudan and a 'tin-pot' dictator in North Korea got the bomb and the President of Iran wanted to go nuclear too. Meanwhile, nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStations, it said.

But in a different perspective, it says the point they are trying to make isn't about conflict or great men.

It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before and the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.

"You. Me. Everyone. Everyone is who is transforming the information age by creating and consuming content," the magazine's Managing Editor, Richard Stengel, told CNN's Soledad O'Brien.

"You know, I felt in a very profound way something in the world change this year, that there was an ebbing of power from the few to the many, and big media companies like ours were, in fact, not in control anymore. It's a great new digital democracy," Stengel said.

The tool that makes it possible, Time says, is the World Wide Web. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution, it stresses.

The magazine says there is an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

It says Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of six billion, the magazine explains.

But it says 2006 threw up some ideas. This issue will act as an an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.

Let’s just say it could be a chance for people to really take a long hard look at themselves.