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Mark Zuckerberg ? not Julian Assange ? is Time's Person of the Year.

So they stayed in the realm of the internet and picked someone who more people can agree is a hero. It's straightforward and nice to celebrate Facebook and leave Wikileaks for more serious news analysis.

ADDED:  Link to the actual Time article:

In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale. We are now running our social lives through a for-profit network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over.

Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S. It's a permanent fact of our global social reality. We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here.

AND: The runners up are: The Tea Party...

In a sense, identifying with the Tea Party movement was like catching Beatlemania in the 1960s. People were drawn in for different reasons ? the beat, the haircuts, the lyrics ? and great gulfs of taste divided the John fans from the Paul fans, the George fans from the Ringo fans.

... Julian Assange...

He is inclined to the grandiose. Contempt for nearly every authority drives his work...

... Hamid Karzai...

There are two schools of thought about Hamid Karzai. The first is that he's a vain, incompetent, monumentally corrupt leader with serious mood-disorder problems that require medication....

... and the Chilean Miners....

A mother lode of luck and faith was involved. But the rescue also showcased a commodity even rarer today than the gold the miners were quarrying: leadership.

Full post as published by Althouse on December 15, 2010 (boomark / email).