There’s a scene in the 1998 movie The Big Lebowski when Jeff Bridges’ perpetually baked character, “The Dude,” finds himself staring at his reflection in the mirrored cover of Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” issue. But “The Dude” is the last person to do something noteworthy enough for a spot on newsstands. Link together millions of real life dudes, dorks, geeks and dabblers through the Internet and they start looking a lot more influential – enough to end up as 2006’s biggest newsmaker.

This year, Time picked “You” as its Person of the Year. “You”—or, more accurately, “We”—have earned the recognition of these old media stalwarts.

The cover decision was not entirely unexpected (NewAssignment.Net, among others, reported on it back in November) and Time has been known to lean toward the gimmicky before, but this selection is remarkable nonetheless. When an old lion of big media like Time turns to recognize the collective contributions of bloggers, Wikipedians, and open source programmers, it’s some sort of milestone, a clear indication that the Great Man theory is in demise.

Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media made an interesting observation about the magazine’s choice of words. “There’s a tiny bit of reality in the fact that the cover didn’t say “Us” instead of ‘You,’” he wrote. “In part because it was a vestige of the magazine’s traditional, royal thinking wherein they told us everything and we bought it or didn’t. If the people of the year are all of you, that leaves ‘we the deciders of what is news’ still inside the gates.”

This is precisely why NewAssignment.Net considers this an award for the collective “We” not just an external “You.”

Creative Knitting Taught Online: Photo courtesy BPC on FlickrKnitting is a centuries-old skill, traditionally passed from one generation to the next within families and small communities. After learning by example the basics of knit one, purl one, apprentice knitters pick up more advanced techniques like decorative stitches and buttonholes by imitating

So what’s a lone knitter in Malaysia to do? Knitters have gone online; of the many corners of the Internet, the immense knitting blog network is one of the liveliest and coziest.

Along with a general rise in the popularity of knitting in the past few years, the Internet has seen a proliferation of knitting blogs and other online resources like video tutorials and webzines dedicated to the craft. Blog rings, like knitting blogs, can include a loose association of blogs from Nordic Knit Blogs (for Scandinavian aficionados of the craft) to Christian Knitters (for the born-again knitter). Hundreds and sometimes thousands of bloggers — connect online because of their passion for knitting.

Proponents of user-generated media make a lot of lofty claims about the potential of open source. Under the right conditions, it can be a great way of gathering and sorting information. So could it also be used by some of the biggest information sifters on the planet—U.S. intelligence agencies?

This week’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “Open-Source Spying,” written by Clive Thompson, reports on efforts by the intelligence community to replace its current clutter of outdated technologies with more a responsive and bottom-up “Spying 2.0.”

“Spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind,” writes Thompson. “The answer may lie in the interactive tools the world’s teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker online about their favorite bands. Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn’t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it’s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?”

Thompson began pursuing the story as a follow-up on how American spy agencies have adapted since the intelligence failures that led to the terror attacks. Even as he learned more about the vast technical challenge of combining incompatible databases from different agencies, it became obvious that this was only part of the story.

Any new project on the scale of NewAssignment is going to come saddled with a glossary of labels. Now seems as good a time as any to hash out the semantic debates of pro-am journalism, while the whole project is still in its semi-verbal infancy.

One neologism in particular seems to be raising some hackles: crowdsourcing, a word popularized this June in a Wired article by Jeff Howe. While Howe wasn’t Credit: Gabyu — Flickrwriting specifically about citizen journalism, the sorts of open source production he discusses (Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, open source corporate R&D at InnoCentiveetc) are based on the same model of harnessing the contributions of a crowd of volunteers.

But as long as it’s been around, crowdsourcing – as a word to define the practice — has come under scrutiny. Even before Howe’s article appeared, ValleyWag.com, a gossip blog on the Silicon Valley beat, was already tagging it a euphemism for exploiting unskilled labor. (“‘Crowdsourcing’ is sexy and totally not an idea as old as serfdom!”).

At issue here isn’t just a debate over semantics, although that’s important, too. The question of what we end up calling these emerging forms of journalism is tied up with the role that contributors—who may often be untrained and unpaid—will play. What motivation do they have to participate if the process feels exploitative or if media conglomerates co-opt the language of crowdsourcing as a way to justify torrential newsroom layoffs?