"The new Web is a very different thing," writes author Lev Grossman in the Time cover story. "It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution."

If you're reading The Daily Reel you'll find this article more reaffirmation than news. But what makes it special is that sometimes it takes mainstream media's blessing to generate mainstream acceptance. Just Saturday night I attended a party where I had countless people tell me they'd seen me on Fox Philadelphia news. I chuckled because they were hardly intrigued that some of my viral videos have had anywhere from 500,000 to a million views. But a local Fox story with maybe 75,000 viewers made them think I'm a celebrity. It's changing quickly, but TIME, Fox, CNN and Howard Stern still have a much stronger influence than we do.

More than 18 years ago, Business Week ran a cover story on blogs changing the business world. Ever since, large corporations have developed blog policies, launched CEO blogs, monitored them and had blog experts advise them on additional tactics. Nobody wanted to be left out.

Now TIME is saying that user-generated media is worthy of attention by people that don't yet develop or consume it. We've reached a tipping point. Whether this leads to a bubble or a burst is unclear, but rest assured the next 3-12 months will feel very different. Major media players will enter. Madison Avenue will raise the stakes on advertising. And eventually we'll demand and receive better content from fewer talented people. Today, there exists, according to Technorati, about 55 million blogs, but only a very small portion attract the bulk of readers.

What's going to happen to the latest form of consumer-generated media: video? It's Darwinian. There's a "thinning of the herd" coming, where a select few will develop an increased following even if there will always be room for a cute "one-hit wonder" and videos for niche audiences.

Grossman ended his piece with this thought:

"Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them."

And just remember. It's getting crowded in there. If you want them to look back, you'd better get creative, or scream loudly.