Time - The world's influential personne poll

The Moot is the owner and creator of 4chan.org, an imageboard website. The site was launched in 2003, the website is very successful because there is minimal rule on posted comments. It is possible to post comments anonymously.

4Chan.org

4chan.org is a very successful website but not when compared to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other big social media websites.

Traffic 4Chan.org - Alexa 2009

If I believe the results of the poll from Time magazine, Moot is the most influential person on the planet…sounds pretty odd. To be honest with you before today I had never heard his name before and had only once visited 4chan.org!

So how could the Moot be more influent than Obama, Putin and even Oprah? A possible answer is through “cheating” or to be exact hacking. It is quite easy to find online scripts in order to hack the Time magazine pool, they may have used the failure on the URL protocol in order to increase the number of votes.

Script - Vote for Moot

The 4chan community would have the rest and sent the Moot to the top of the poll!

Vote for Moot

The biggest question is why Time magazine still believes that an almost total stranger can be the most influential person on the planet?

If you want to know what kind of books or movies are out on your birthday you just have to enter the date and Google do the rest (date in US format).

This Google tool is very fast and well presented. Google News Timeline allows the user to look for a specific category, date or topic (via keywords).

Google News Timeline

Generally this tool is great, but the further we go back in the past (e.g. :20 years), the less sources we find (mostly Wikipedia, Time magazine and some baseball news). Also, I am not sure what additional value this tool provides compared to BBC Archive or The Times Archive.

Time Archive

At the end of the day Google News Timeline uses these different sources (the Times, BBC etc…) and compiles them by date.

In conclusion, it is a good tool but not unique. I don’t see a big need for Google News Timeline.