Each year, TIME Magazine- now also a largely successful web entity- names one notable person who has, “for better or worse,” been most influential on the events of that year.

Decades past have seen revered modern heros such as Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Jr. take the title- while in other years, villains of the 20th century such as Hitler or Stalin’s negative impact on world events made them the person of ‘their’ years. Recent issues have seen more ephemeral choices, such as 2006′s “You”- selected for the prominence of user-generated content on the web on sites like Wikipedia and MySpace. 2011 has turned out to be another year during which a more nebulous entity was chosen after a year of worldwide revolt largely sparked by social media- “The Protester.”

In a lengthy profile of The Protester, TIME explains first why protest has become relevant again after decades, revived in the internet era. The mag says:

Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant.

TIME comments on a shared profile “The Protester” tends to have:

It’s remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries’ political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they’re experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.

It continues:

During the bubble years, perhaps, there was enough money trickling down to keep them happyish, but now the unending financial crisis and economic stagnation make them feel like suckers. But this year, instead of plugging in the headphones, entering an Internet-induced fugue state and quietly giving in to hopelessness, they used the Internet to find one another and take to the streets to insist on fairness and (in the Arab world) freedom.

Do you think The Protester is the most influential person of 2011? Do you agree with TIME?

[TIME]

And ‘TIME’ Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ is… The Protester is a post from: The Inquisitr

Seriously, it’s almost like Skynet is just around the corner and Zuckerbaby has been hired as it’s PR person.

The most plastic looking Person of the Year from Time yet is a post from: The Inquisitr

The clocks had to “spring forward” in the middle of the night last night, even if you slept through it. .

Daylight Savings confuses the hell out of people, even though most of our time-telling devices (computers, cable boxes and cell phones, for instance) update themselves at the moment clocks change. Some regions and countries observed the ritual early this morning, some don’t at all, and some will in a few weeks.

Confusion about the current time is not the only side effect of the practice (started in the 1940s to save energy during World War II)- the first few days following the clocks changing is marked by a spike in heart attacks. Car accidents, pedestrian deaths and suicides also rise considerably while people adjust to the new schedule.

If you’re unclear on whether the clocks have changed in your region, there’s a handy governmental tool where you can click on your location and deduce the current local time. Time.gov shows not only the time, but highlights the areas where the Daylight Savings practice is not observed.

What time is it where I live? is a post from: The Inquisitr

After writing about how newspapers seem hellbent to act like a bunch of lemmings headed over a cliff under the rallying cry of Rupert Murdoch it is almost a pleasure to write about a bunch of magazine competitors who seem to have finally caught on to how they might be able to succeed as their world changes around them.

As much as the newspaper industry might be facing some hard times the road forward has to be doubly hard for those publishing magazines. Where newspapers can at least fall back on the old mantra of printing the news as it happens magazine have always be thought of as the more of a monthly collection of long prose and glossy pictures. All of which is really hard to market in the Internet age – especially one crawling headlong into the real-time web.

Where they have funnily enough stood a chance of surviving in my opinion is in the growing mobile space where if done right their presentation is suited to the small viewing area fond on smartphones. The two big problems though are that people are increasingly use to a one-stop shopping experience ala iTunes and the App Store and aren’t inclined to go running about the web and paying piecemeal for content. The other problem is much more basic – people want everything for free especially when it comes to news.

With that in mind Time Inc., Conde Nast and Hearst have agreed to come together under the banner of a new company that will provide a unified web store where readers will be able to buy any one of the 50 magazines that the various partners publish.

Each magazine publisher now believes it’s too risky to go it alone to find new ways to get consumers to pay. If they all join together, the reasoning goes, they stand a better chance of producing greater revenue.

The deal is taking time to complete because it involves so many moving pieces.

“It’s pretty complicated stuff,” said a source. “The really, really hard part is that you’ve got so many different kinds of devices running on different operating systems. And how do you handle that? The consortium provides one point of contact for the consumer. When you come to the main store, you can get the content any way you want.”

Source: The Observer

Now as Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb noted

Most importantly, these companies will also have to reinvent their magazines for the digital age along the lines of Wired’s app for the rumored Apple Tablet or Condé Nast’s iPhone version of GQ (iTunes link). One of the reasons these publications are suffering is the long lead time that makes most of the content outdated by the time it arrives at the printer. While this still works for magazines like the Atlantic, which mostly publishes in-depth long form articles that aren’t time-sensitive, gossip magazines can’t really compete with TMZ or Perez Hilton. Just putting a digital copy of their magazines online simply won’t cut it.

He’s absolutely right – just unifying what they are already doing on the web under one umbrella and expecting people to be willing to pay for it based on that alone will only guarantee that the project will fail.

If they do manage to come up with unique content available via the store alone in order to add some extra value people are willing to pay for then yes I think this is a viable idea that could work out very well.

Too bad Murdoch doesn’t try forward thinking ideas like this instead of beating his chest against the big bully called Google.

Magazine rivals to join forces for iTunes-like magazine stand is a post from: The Inquisitr

Did you see those last three Twitter messages that flew by?

Did you really read all the messages posted to your Facebook timeline in the last hour?

Have you managed to get caught up with all those RSS feeds that piled into your feed reader since you logged off last night?

How close are you to screaming email bankruptcy from the highest office building in the city?

Just how many alerts have you missed in the last couple of hours from Google, your never ending beeping Blackberry, from some iPhone app you thought would make things easier?

How many of you have jokingly asked in the last half hour if someone had a few hours they could sell you because you don’t seem to have enough of your own?

Everything is clamoring for your attention and no matter how hard you try at some point you get that blank deer caught in the headlights look as you realize that there is just too much information screaming for your attention and time. As your brain begins to freeze up in a spastic firing of neurons crying out for respite you begin to realize that the majority of all that stuff clamoring for your attention is nothing more than noise.

The problem is that as we are inexorably led to a web where things really do happen in real-time, is that more and more noise is being generated. This is leading us to a point where we are having to forego any real depth to the few and far between bits of real information fight for our attention. Everything is bite size, short posts, 140 character messages, Facebook Lite, even television commercials are spoken faster so more can fit in a smaller time scale.

Documents created today will stand a good chance of being outdated by tomorrow. News that was fresh and important is almost outdated by the time you hit the publish button. Information distribution cycles are getting squeezed unmercifully and as a result the moment we take our eyes off of the screen we begin to feel the cold sweat of the fear we are going to miss something.

Never mind about daydreaming, or having a friendly conversation over coffee without a laptop or smartphone close. God forbid we should eschew undivided one on one attention in favor of zeros and ones sent to us over the Web. Even conversations are becoming some sort of universal shorthand so that we can get our thoughts across as quick as possible and move onto the next bit-size morsel of information that has been put on a diet.

There is no doubt that this is the direction our world is headed in – a world where everything comes at you all at once and where you hope that you can maintain some sort of attention long enough to catch everything so that you don’t miss those few and far between important snack bite sizes pieces of information. Chances are that being the incredibly intelligent race that we are that we will find ways to cope with the constant onslaught of information.

Coping however is not the same as learning and growing. Sure we might actually have people who thrive in this kind of environment but for the majority the assault on our ever decreasing attention spans may be a bigger cost that we might think.

Anyone with some attention to sell, I seem to have lost some of mine. is a post from: The Inquisitr

I have the greatest admiration for people who can think about things so far out there and yet make them seem totally plausible. Scientists are excellent at this and prove it once more with the notion that – according to a new theory – time may literally be running; and could one day vanish altogether.

The concept is based on string theory ideas which allow dimensions of space and time to swap places. The overall theory belongs to Professor Jose Senovilla, at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. It is a theory that goes counter to the prevailing “dark energy” theory which physicists purpose as being the force that is driving galaxies apart.

Professor Senovilla on the other hand suggests

…. there is no such thing as dark energy. Instead, he says we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating because time itself is slowing down.
At our local everyday level, the change would be imperceptible.

But it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years.

Astronomers work out the speed of the universe’s expansion from the frequency of light emitted by certain types of supernovae, or exploding stars.

However, these measurements depend on our current perception of time, says Prof Senovilla.
If time has been slowing down, and clocks are now running more slowly than they did long ago, it would appear from our perspective as if things have been speeding up. Looking back over billions of years, galaxies would seem to be travelling away from each other faster and faster at various intervals since the Big Bang.

“Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating,” said Senovilla.

Source: BreakingNews.ie :: Bizarre theory suggests time may be running out

As Professor Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist as Cambridge University who finds the while idea interesting, says

“We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear – that’s just the reverse effect,” he said.

Mind you this isn’t something that we’ll need to pencil into our date books anytime soon given that this happening probably wouldn’t occur for a few billion years.

Get your science geek on: Time could disappear is a post from: The Inquisitr

Time Magazine has named Christopher Poole (aka Moot), the founder of 4chan, the most influential person in the world.

The annual most influential person poll included as nominees US President Barack Obama, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Angelina Jolie, the Dali Lama, and many many other well known world leaders and celebrities.

In an open, free and transparent vote, Moot recieved 16,794,368 votes for an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100). Runner up, Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, received 2,316,278 votes with an influence rating of 47/ 100.

The screenshot below does not reflect the final number of votes, but does accurately reflect the order when voting was finalized.

Time names 4chan founder Moot the most influential person in the world is a post from: The Inquisitr

When the result isn’t going the way you want it to, there’s only one thing to do: cheat. And that’s what Time Magazine has done in the voting for 2009′s Time 100.

As we reported yesterday, Moot, the founder and owner of 4chan was topping the list with 275,000 votes with an average score of 75/100. Today Moot has 280,000 votes with an average score of 53/100 and is in 3rd place…but not before going lower, as the pic above that is currently doing the rounds demonstrates. The likelihood of Moot obtaining 5,000 additional votes in 24 hours and droping that much rank, while at the same time Jon Stewart doubled his total votes is impossible. Note also that the places are ranked by score, not total votes, but how you’d drop down that number out of 100 with 5000 votes from 280,000 is again impossible. Moot has been hobbled.

Time cheats on Time 100 vote to avoid giving the prize to 4chan’s Moot is a post from: The Inquisitr

Christopher Poole, who goes by the name of Moot is included as one of 203 nominees, and at the time of writing tops the voting list with 275,000 votes for an average score of 75 out of 100. In second place is TV host Jon Stewart with 158,900 votes for a score of 71 from 100.

Other nominees include CNBC’s Jim Cramer, Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe, Barrack Obama and the cast of The View. Ron Paul maintains his strong support base, currently sitting in 3rd position.

You can vote for Moot here.

4chan founder Moot topping Time 100 poll is a post from: The Inquisitr

Gannett’s newspaper division has announced a new round of layoffs. The company will reduce staff numbers by 10% during the first week of December, according to E&P. As we reported October 24, Gannett, which publishes USA Today and a range of titles domestically and overseas saw newspaper advertising revenue drop 17.6% in the quarter ending September 08.

Time is to cut 6% of its workforce, or around 600 people in a restructure to be formally announced Tuesday, according to the NY Times (registration required). The job cuts would be implemented over the following two weeks. The report notes that Time doesn’t plan to shut any magazines, but some titles will be “severely cut back.”

Local television stations appear to be doing it tougher than first thought, according to Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield quoted at Silicon Alley Insider. The crisis in the car industry (in part due to the broader economic crisis) is driving a massive drop in car advertising, with auto related advertising dropping 50% over the last 12 months. Car advertising accounts for 25% of all local TV advertising. Worse may be ahead, with a growing rate of car yard closures, and the possible merger of Chrysler and GM delivering even less advertising then today.

Media Briefs: Gannett to cut 10%, Time 600, TV stations hit by car industry is a post from: The Inquisitr

thePlatform will collect and publish video content for the site and provide its playback systems as well. HBO, CNN, and Showtime all feature material on Road Runner.

Just last week, thePlatform bought out social media company Chirp Interactive — creator of Chirpscreen, a utility that integrated Facebook and Twitter content into a screensaver. The company indicated it would use Chirp’s models to further develop its own products.

thePlatform Signs Deal with Cable Competitor is a post from: The Inquisitr