Ugh. Completely unrelated to the actual content -- why, oh why, do people take a simple thing like static tabular data, and make a Flash object out of it? Why? Now it doesn't scroll like anything else does, and in exchange for losing the ability to scroll-wheel through the list, I get ... nothing.
I was surprised to see Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela at the end, IMHO they should be way higher. Most of the people on the list I really do not know. I recognized a few artists, but thats all. The pope is number 74, I suppose there are only 1,131,000,000 catholics in the world.
Somewhere below the Dalai Lama...and all those other people.
Of course, we should take this very seriously, since number 2 right now (and the landslide winner last year), is someone by the name of "Rain" who is apparently a pop sensation (and obviously incredibly influential) in Korea or some other place where "pop sensation" really means something--not like our namby pamby pop sensations here in the States.
I think it's safe to say that Time Magazine is thoroughly on the right path when it comes to user generated content.
Time's Man of the Year was not originally an endorsement. It was simply the person who'd affected the news most that year. Since a significant number of readers continued to misinterpret it as an endorsement, Time eventually gave in and made it one. But that was much later.
