So, 2006 has been the Year of You. “You” as any individual, consumer, user, amateur, person, personality, etc. With a strong tendency toward netizens living in the U.S. and participating in the so-called “Web 2.0” phenomenon.

For instance, “You” are (is) TIME‘s person of the year.

TIME.com: Now It’s Your Turn — Dec. 25, 2006 — Page 1

TIME.com: Time’s Person of the Year: You — Dec. 25, 2006 — Page 1

To some occasional readers of U.S. mainstream magazines, TIME‘s decision sounds like a rehash of the July 1 issue of Business 2.0:

The 50 Who Matter Now – July 1, 2006

1 You! THE CONSUMER AS CREATOR WHY YOU MATTER: They’ve long said the customer is always right. But they never really meant it. Now they have no choice. You–or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you–continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest. You do it on websites like Amazon, Flickr, and YouTube, via podcasts and SMS polling, and on millions of self-published blogs. In every case, you’ve become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience. But the You Revolution goes well beyond user-generated content. Companies as diverse as Delta Air Lines and T-Mobile are turning to you to create their ad slogans. Procter & Gamble and Lego are incorporating your ideas into new products. You constructed open-source and are its customer and its caretaker. None of this should be a surprise, since it was you–your crazy passions and hobbies and obsessions–that built out the Web in the first place. And somewhere out there, you’re building Web 3.0. We don’t yet know what that is, but one thing’s for sure: It will matter.

Quite insightful in both cases. But not as much as the Internet’s Six Cultures model.

Personally, I’d like to see more people discussing the concepts of individualism, self-determination, creativity, social change, mercantilism, democracy, egoticism, and global identities in this You-focused context.