This years 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 years 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 Times 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 persons name spelled out marblecake and also the game. Dont Google the first one its 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 4chans Project Chanology, a series of digital and real-life protests against the Church of Scientology.
Oh, and 4chans founder, Christopher Moot Poole, won the online voting that year.
Mashables 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 its natural to assume that Anonymous supporters found some crafty means for automatically inflating the vote count of their favorite entry, Anonymous representatives insist thats not the case.
This @mashable article on the #Time100 vote is complete rubbish, says a Twitter post by @YourAnonNews.
Elsewhere on the Internet, Gawkers Adrian Chen attempted to launch a campaign to have Zooey Deschanel beat out Reddits chief babysitter Erik Martin, who was in first place with around 120,000 votes to Deschanels 12,000 at the time of Chens 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: Its final list of influential entities for this years Top 100 issue will be chosen by the magazines editors for the big April 17 reveal, not by popular vote. Which makes the Time 100 poll feel a bit more like an April Fools Day project than a serious undertaking: Its fun to see the creativity that the online world can put forth each year, but theres little else to be gained.
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