This year's Time 100 poll has come and gone — at least, the online popular vote of who the world considers to be the most influential person of the year. And the question remains: Do we really learn anything from the annual ritual?
If anything, it appears that the various online communities have gotten lazy with this year's online ballot-stuffing. Only two Internet "celebrities" graced the top ten this year: The hacktivist group Anonymous (which makes one wonder who, technically, should come pick up the prize) and Erik Martin, general manager of the sprawling online community, Reddit — taking spots one and two, respectively.
Contrast that to Time's 2009 poll, where members of the online community 4chan were able to perfectly rig the first 21 entries of the vote such that the first letter of each person's name spelled out "marblecake" and "also the game." Don't Google the first one — it's not just a fairly horrific sexual term, but it was also allegedly the name of a chat room that served as the online meeting grounds for 4chan's Project Chanology, a series of digital and real-life protests against the Church of Scientology.
Oh, and 4chan's founder, Christopher "Moot" Poole, won the online voting that year.
Mashable's Lauren Indvik wrote that Anonymous fans found a method to push more than 14,000 votes per hour to the Time poll, jumping the Anonymous entry from around 40,000 votes on Thursday to more than 380,00 votes on Friday. While it's natural to assume that Anonymous supporters found some crafty means for automatically inflating the vote count of their favorite entry, Anonymous "representatives" insist that's not the case.
"This @mashable article on the #Time100 vote is complete rubbish," says a Twitter post by @YourAnonNews.
Elsewhere on the Internet, Gawker's Adrian Chen attempted to launch a campaign to have Zooey Deschanel beat out "Reddit's chief babysitter" Erik Martin, who was in first place with around 120,000 votes to Deschanel's 12,000 at the time of Chen's article. Deschanel ended up in 26th place, gaining approximately 8,000 votes as part of the "anti-Reddit" campaign, whereas Martin more than doubled his vote count to a final total of 264,193.
Does any of this really matter, however? Not to Time: It's final list of influential entities for this year's Top 100 issue will be chosen by the magazine's editors for the big April 17 reveal, not by popular vote. Which makes the "Time 100" poll feel a bit more like an April Fool's Day project than a serious undertaking: It's fun to see the creativity that the online world can put forth each year, but there's little else to be gained.
For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).
