Time Person of the Year is YOU! Yes, You! No, Don't Turn Around ... it's You.

This year Time magazine has chosen us - the bloggers, podcasters, video-bloggers, amateur reviewers, would-be journalists - as its collective person of the year.

Funny, around this time last year or perhaps the start of the year, I posted something that the BBC had written about 2005 being the year of citizen journalism.

Time asks

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? 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?

Well, if you put it like that..... Me, I guess. And hundreds of us out there. And what keeps us going? This is the million naira question. It's true that as soon as I get home (assuming I don't go to the gym after work), almost the first thing I do is to turn on my computer and I'm usually still there until I go to bed. I was actually starting to think that it's a very sad state of affairs and that I need to tear myself away from this damned computer. Well, thanks, Time for making me feel much better about myself.

No, seriously though. I'm not sure that I blog for any particularly 'honourable' reasons like wanting to portray Nigeria in a better light or to share my views on worthy topics like politics or economics. I simply enjoy writing about whatever's on my mind (be it 'worthy' or not). And I enjoy the feeling of community you develop with the people who read your blog and the people who write the blogs you visit.

Sometimes, though, I feel that a lot of these types of articles that you read (especially in publications like Time and Newsweek), which attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the times - in this case being, "I have a point of view and I want to share it with the whole world. And thank God for blogs, Flickr and all these wonderful web 2.0 technologies" can come across as just a tad over-effusive and catching the tail end of the trend. I remember reading some Technorati report a few weeks ago about how the number of new blogs being created daily was slowing down (inevitably) and how this is probably due to the novelty wearing off and the people who are most attracted to blogging already most likely own blogs.