Time Magazine has made an unorthodox pick for person of the year: You.

As in YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia and the other types of new media that have exploded in the past year.

"There are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006," Lev Grossman, the publication's book critic, wrote in the magazine's Dec. 25 edition.

"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. ...

"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."

Grossman credited the World Wide Web for this. The technology became popular about a decade ago, leading to the much-hyped dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

However, he said the Web is now in a new era.

"The new Web is a very different thing. 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."

From the home videos of YouTube to profiles on the social networking site Facebook to podcasts, Americans created like never before, he said.

"America loves its solitary geniuses -- its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses -- but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others," he said.

"Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux.

"We're looking at 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."

Grossman acknowledged that Web 2.0 "harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom.

"Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred. But that's what makes all this interesting," he said.

"This is 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. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious."

People who mattered

The magazine also identified 26 traditional newsmakers.

Among them included North Korea's President Kim Jong Il, whose country conducted its first nuclear test this year; Pope Benedict; and the troika of U.S. President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Editor Richard Stengel said if the magazine had to go with one newsmaker, it would have been Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"It just felt to me a little off selecting him,'' Stengel said.

Ahmadinejad just finished hosting a conference that featured some of the world's most notorious Holocaust deniers.

The magazine has avoided naming an individual before.

In 1966, it cited the 25-and-under generation. Women were named in 1975, and a personal computer graced the cover of the 1982 edition.

"I always love it when it's a person -- and it is a person, not a computer or something like that,'' Stengel said. "We just felt there wasn't a single person who embodied this phenomenon.''

In 2005, three people shared the cover -- the rock star Bono, and philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates of Microsoft fame.

They were named because of their charitable work and activism in the areas of global poverty reduction and improving health.

With files from the Associated Press