Zuckerberg actually is the Person of the Year. You made it so.

Last week Time Magazine named Mark Zuckerberg its "Person of the Year". Guessing the "Person of the Year" is perhaps the one remaining upper-middle-class parlour game, where you can stroke your chin, cluck your tongue and wonder if they are going to go for the painfully obvious (2008 - Obama, 1989/2000 - Bush) or throw a curveball (1988 - Planet Earth,  1983 - The Computer).

As is to be expected, the choice of Zuckerberg put many people up in arms, but the most interesting were the cries from tech journalists. There was the predictable mocking of Time, implying that they only just now discovered Facebook after the rest of the world did. Many of them said that this showed the death of print journalism, how it didn't reflect what was really going on in the online world, how it could never capture that zeitgeist anymore. Others also said that it seemed odd to reward Zuckerberg with the honour considering that he wasn't really changing the world.

What's interesting here is that who is really out of step are those very same writers, who have forgotten the most important thing of all: Know what you're talking about.

First of all, the person of the year is not an "honour" in the traditional sense. Its purpose, as defined by Time, is the acknowledge the person who "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year.". Hence there is the frequently cited Ayatollah Khomeini (1979) and Adolph Hitler (1938), people who would not have been hailed as heroes at that time. It's why you also have the aforementioned Computer and Planet Earth. If you want to honour the person who changed the world for a given time period, please check the Nobel prizes. Time is not the place, and does not set itself out to be that place, so please don't try to be angry about something that it is not.

A lot of people felt that Julian Assange should have been "Person of the Year", but considering most of his impact was (1) late in the year and (2) we've yet to see how it fully develops, let's hold off a bit. (I plan to be writing more on this later)

Secondly, if you're going to claim that Zuckerberg did not have a high impact on news for the year, please check a lot of what you, as tech writers, wrote this year. Topics included

• Ongoing privacy concerns about Facebook, leading to how we live online and shifting notions of what privacy was for this online generation;
• Many articles about politicians going outside the traditional press cycle and communicating to people via Facebook (such as Sarah Palin);
• Facebook launching Social Graph, stretching beyond its walled garden and placing its content and functionality on other sites
• The Social Network being a critical and commercial hit.
• Zuckerberg's funding of the pubic school system in Newark
• Zuckerberg's signing The Giving Pledge, stating he will donate most of his earnings over his lifetime to charity.

This is without even going into the continued expansion of social networking/media, how it's tied into everything from "slacktivism" to Old Spice marketing campaigns. I'm not even touching on Facebook Places being launched, and any number of "Facebook vs Google vs Twitter" pieces that filled tech blogs. Even if a lot of the activity was on networks like Twitter, the fact that Zuckerberg's creation is still the gold standard for not only social media but web traffic makes him the de facto poster boy for the technology.

So, let me see if I got this straight:

1. Print journalism is ridiculously out of step with what is really going on, and tech journalists really know the pulse of the online world.
2. Most tech writers spent the whole year writing about Zuckerberg as a personality, social media as a medium of cultural change, and Facebook as one of the biggest businesses in the world.
3. Time says that Zuckerberg has had the most impact on the news for 2010.

From where I sit, it seems like Time in determining who had the most impact of the news actually listened to you and understood what you were saying, and that you're the ones who didn't take the time to understand what Time was saying, and blaming it for your own oversight/laziness in actually finding out what the actual story was.

Because, after all, you wrote it.