According to the annual TIME Magazine poll, the most influential person in the world is someone called moot. Who? Well he’s a kid in his twenties who happens to be the founder and leading light of subversive website 4chan, the users of which in turn happen to be behind such successful Internet memes as the infamous Rickrolling phenomenon which saw links all over the web pointing to a 1987 music video of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley.

Surely ‘moot’ cannot really be the most influential person on the planet, beating the likes of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey or even the Korean pop star ‘Rain’ who has apparently pretty much dominated this pointless poll in recent years.

The answer is no, he cannot be, and indeed is not. The clue as to why he won can be revealed if you look at the 21 names which topped the poll, specifically the first letters of their names which spell out the phrase ‘marblecake also the game.’ Marblecake is an IRC channel which was responsible for the much publicised ‘message to scientology’ video meme for example.

A Time spokeswoman confirmed that the hack had taken place, telling The Register that “We took many preventative measures to maintain the integrity of the Time 100 poll on Time.com, and moot has a passionate community of users who worked to influence the poll.”

For what really happened, then, we need to dig deeper into the mechanics of the hack itself and that’s exactly what Paul Lamere managed to do by speaking to the people behind it. He recounts how he had a 4am meeting in an online chatroom with someone only calling himself Zombocom who revealed that members of the 4chan /b/ board decided to try and rig the voting after discovering Time had put moot on the list of 200 nominees following an earlier interview in the magazine. They did this by first creating autovoters to perform the required HTTP get on a voting url which enabled votes to be triggered via spam urls. The way the urls were crafted meant that it was relatively simple to push multiple low value votes, ratings of 1, to any given candidate. When Time eventually spotted voting irregularity, namely that moot had a 300 percent approval ratting while everyone else was below zero, the magazine changed the voting protocol and added an MD5 hash of the url together with a salt, or secret word, to make things secure. Which they would have been were it not for a 4chan /b/ board member discovering that salt sitting within the voting Flash app and extracted it.

When Zombocom found he could pretty much vote as quickly as his computer allowed, which was 500 votes per minute or thereabouts, he set about having some fun on the side and decided to enlist his friends to manipulate the results to spell out the Marblecake message.

Perhaps it is time that Time pulled the plug on this poll once and for all, or at least brought it in house and away from the whims of the online pranksters.

Twitter is many different things to many different people. For some it is a serious news distribution medium. For some it is the marketing medium of the moment. For some it is scientific research. For some, like myself, it is just a bit of fun and a chance to make new friends online. For others, it seems, Twitter is a misunderstood evil that must be defeated.

Well, that is the way it would appear in the strange case of Steve Molyneux, also known as ProfOnTheProwl to those who use Twitter. An IT consultant and former Microsoft Professor of Learning Technologies at Wolverhampton University, Molyneux was until very recently also a magistrate in Telford, Shropshire. A position he had served in for some 16 years.

The mistake that Mr Molyneux would have appeared to have made was to be an avid fan of Twitter, where he would tweet about what he was up to, like many of us. In his case, of course, this would mean messages which reported the outcome of cases to the online public. Tweets such as “Finished hearing bail. 3 refused for planning robbery of £480,000 from Tsb in Dawley, Telford.” However, these messages were few and far between, with most of his tweets being the usual mix of chat and travel reports.

But it was enough for some legal Luddites, who most likely have no idea what Twitter is and would not what a tweet was if it crept up and kicked them in the arse, decided that Mr Molyneux should answer for his crimes. And so it was that he resigned after, according to a BBC report “an individual within the court system lodged a complaint.”

In a tweet Molyneux noted “Resigned due to breach of trust. I could not serve the community thinking someone sitting with me on the bench was that person.” Being ordered before the Shropshire Advisory Committee with regards to his behaviour was the final straw it would seem. Quoted in The Telegraph Molyneux says “The powers that be have totally overreacted to this by about 300 per cent, they probably don’t even understand the technology.”

As part of an ongoing conversation on his Twitter feed, the ex-magistrate insists that the “Telford Bench is an excellent bench as is the Magistry. I was not forced to resign but did so as a mater of integrity” and goes on to confirm that he did “not tweet in court hearing the case but in the break and after the case. To tweet in court would be gross misconduct.”

I’m not usually one to recommend watching online video clips but this one is a real cracker. It shows a biomedical engineering student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison apparently posting to Twitter using his brain.

OK, that in itself is something to celebrate given the quality of some Twitter postings which suggest no brain cells were wasted in writing them. However, the message “using EEG to send tweet” was, we are assured, composed and posted using nothing more than the power of thought and an interface between the brain of the researcher and the computer in question.

Aimed at helping those who suffer from ‘locked in syndrome’ where the body has failed but the brain is working properly, such as can happen following a brain stem stroke or a spinal cord injury, the system uses an electrode studded cap which picks up the electrical signals from the brain and map them to pshysical movement on the computer screen.

Wilson says that with practise he has “seen people do up to eight characters per minute” using the power of thought alone. Justin Williams, an assistant professor working with Wilson added “This is one of the first examples where we’ve found something that would be immediately useful to a much larger community of people with neurological deficits.”

When it comes to silly technology ideas, any contender for the stupidest gadget ever has got some tough competition to beat. My personal favourite has been, for the longest time, the Microsoft SPOT watch. However, I think I might just have found something even sillier: an iPod for your foetus.

Officially it is known as the Blaby for some reason I have yet to bother even trying to fathom. Perhaps iBaby was already taken, and BabyPod sounded too much like a kid carrying device for new age hippies.

Anyway, according to The Telegraph the Blaby consists of “a contoured belt that wraps around a mother’s waist with three inbuilt vibration speakers playing music into the womb.” The MP3 player is apparently stitched into the belt itself, and there is the inevitable USB adaptor to plug the thing in an upload suitable music so that the foetus can have a little dance. Boom, Boom, Shake the Womb perhaps?

Actually, it would seem that the Canadian inventor is thinking more of classical tunes to not only soothe the unborn child but also give it an intelligent boost. Oh yes, it is that old chestnut the Mozart Effect being brought back into the marketing mix once more.

Which is why this gadget is so silly on so many levels.

Level number one: why bother wearing a belt with speakers that ‘transmit the vibrations of music’ right through the mother and into the womb when those vibrations, otherwise known as sound, can be heard perfectly OK just by playing music in the same room as normal?

Level number two: the Mozart Effect has been pretty well debunked over the years. There is no real proof to substantiate claims that playing a child, even an unborn one, Mozart will produce an increase in spatial reasoning as the theory, or music in general acting as a catalyst for mental health as the inventor, suggests.

“This product is still in the prototype phase, so I have not yet put a price on to it, but I am hoping to attract some interest soon” inventor Geof Ramsay told the Daily Mail. I have been listening to Slipknot non-stop for an hour and my gadget marketing analyst skills have increased substantially as a result. My new found skills tell me that this is one product idea which should be aborted as soon as possible.

File under: a bad day for Microsoft. But a pretty good one for the Australian inventor who will be adding a few big fat zeroes to his bank balance after the largest software business on the planet lost a patent infringement case in the US which is set to cost it a sweet half a billion dollars in damages.

Although Ric Richardson, the founder of Uniloc which was at the heart of the case, will not get all that dosh in his back pocket, you can be sure his percentage of the payout pie will be classed as a nice little earner.

Richardson designed the anti-piracy software that Uniloc successfully claimed was being used within Windows XP and Office software. Microsoft, naturally, is said to be “very disappointed” with the verdict, not least I suspect as jury determined it to be an international patent infringement which means that huge damages award (apparently the 5th highest in US patent law history) could yet double or triple.

Of course, Microsoft is going to appeal on the grounds that the original patent is invalid. The patent, dating from the 90’s, covers software registration systems that prevent the casual copying onto more than the permitted number of computers. Does sound rather familiar, does it not?

In the grip of a recession, businesses are being forced to cut costs. No surprises there then. The results of a new survey have landed in my mailbox, and they reveal that when it comes to the IT sector the first area where those costs get cut is in the hardware spend. Again, hardly surprising as for most of us, most of the time, hardware upgrades can be filed under desirable rather essential. This particular survey targeted SMEs and asked what areas they would cut and in what order, if the recession forced their hand. Hardware was top of the list on 62 percent, followed by 35 percent who said they would cut their investment in IT support and then software licensing on 28 percent. Because the Internet is “a crucial tool in helping them through the recession” only 8 percent considered cutting back on their Internet access compared to 9 percent who were prepared to reduce their back-up and redundancy services.

So, the Internet will not be a victim of the recession then. No surprise there either. However, the least surprising fact comes when it is revealed that the company who undertook this survey was a business Internet Service Provider.

Chris Stening, Easynet Connect managing director, reckons that the findings “reflect the broader trend of IT moving from a software/hardware-based model to increasingly being delivered as a service. As a result, businesses are placing less value on their physical IT assets, and more value on IT services such as the internet and SaaS.”

Davey Winder, cynical journalist, adds “what next, an email provider reporting that the recession will not impact upon communication, or Apple reassuring us that people still want to listen to music when times get tough?” It’s Easter, must be a slow news week…

IT is certainly not immune from the economic downturn, that has become obvious over the last few months. Now it looks like the seemingly bullet-proof mobile market could be set to suffer big time with a $13 billion cut in growth over the next five years.

That’s the conclusion of a report from Juniper Research which warns that the recession will hit the mobile entertainment industry hard. Unless key markets emerge from recession, the report predicts that growth in user spend on mobile entertainment services such as subscription-based content, games and music downloads will slow dramatically over the next two years. Juniper Research also argue that slower deployment of content services will mean revenues are likely to be lower than previously forecast, and that even after those markets emerge from the effects of the economic downturn.

Given a worst case scenario of a prolonged global recession, the report warns that mobile entertainment revenues will increase by nearly $13 billion over the next five years. Sounds good, until you learn that before the downturn hit the figures were showing growth of $26 billion.

Report author Dr Windsor Holden says “While operators have made significant strides in reducing the costs of bundled data, the overwhelming majority of mobile users are prepaid customers who want to sample mobile Internet usage before committing to a bundle. And in most cases, data costs are so high that they act as a disincentive to such initial usage.”

Although there has been plenty of blogosphere gossip regarding the monetisation of Twitter, the hugely popular social networking in 140 characters service, not a great deal of sense has been spoken. Until now. It would appear that an acquisition of Twitter by no less than Google is on the cards. Now that is an exit strategy guaranteed to get the dollar signs flashing. How many dollars? “Well north of the $250 million valuation” that Twitter saw in recent funding according to TechCrunch which broke the story.

Although that story has now been updated from reporting that Google was in “late stage negotiations” to now saying “early stage negotiations” which some people might argue suggests it is just more idle gossip, I am not so sure.

After all, Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone have done the Google sales deal before. Those with good memories will recall that prior to bringing us Twitter, this clever tech business twosome sold Blogger to Google a few years ago.

TechCrunch says that it has sourced the details from “two separate people” who are both “close to the negotiations” although it obviously does not name them, nor any actual dollar value. That said, considering Twitter has recently turned down a reported offer of half a billion bucks from Facebook recently you can expect it to be at least that much, if not a tad more. Or can you? Maybe not, when you take into account that Facebook was offering a part stock deal and many people consider that the Facebook stock is somewhat overvalued. Nobody can argue about the value of Google stock, however, as it is in the public domain. Which means that a Google ‘part cash and part stock’ deal could be less on paper but actually worth more in real terms than the Facebook half a billion.

Why is Google trying to get into the social networking business again, having already pretty much failed with everything it has tried so far? Anyone remember, let alone even have used, Orkut or Lively for example?

The answer, I suspect, is that Google is not after the social networking per se but rather is looking deeper into the core market that has served it so well: search. Yes, that’s right, search. Twitter understands the importance of this, which is why it has already acquired and started rolling out a real time search function. This ability to search for trends in what people are actually talking about, right here and right now, will become ever increasingly important to brands and advertisers alike. It is where the Twitter money is most likely to come from, instead of ‘premium accounts’ and the like. Google understands this as well, and wants a bit of this real time trending action.

Anyone remember the big Earth Hour stunt over the weekend when businesses were being encouraged to turn off servers, desktops and unused appliances for an hour to show solidarity for the energy conversation cause? Well the results are in, and I can announce that as far as the Internet was concerned at least, Earth Hour sucked. Quite literally in fact.

While Earth Hour sponsors WWF (that’s the World Wildlife Fund and not the large men in small tights getting sweaty in a wrestling ring people by the way) were hopeful that a billion people across the planet would switch their lights off to support the initiative, it seems that when it comes to the Internet the term ‘always on’ is suitably apt.

According to Pingdom which monitored sites and servers around the world during the Earth Hour in order to see how many servers actually got switched off, the answer was not enough to make any difference. In fact, Pingdom reports, that when it measured the average uptime availability of some 35,000 sites and servers spread over 126 countries during Earth Hour and then compared the figures with the three previous weeks during the same period there was “no noticeable difference, which means that Earth Hour had no impact upon the Internet.”

Or to put it another way, the Internet sucked up just as much energy during Earth Hour as it does at any other time.

Pingdom is joining the WWF in pleading with online enterprises to join in Earth Hour 2010, itself promising to shut down as much as it can without compromising its service. Which is the important point, and why Earth Hour does not really translate into the online realm. Uptime is the key to any online service, shutting down backup servers would be an unacceptable business risk even for an hour, especially when times are hard and competition is fierce.

To suggest, as Pingdom does, that Facebook should close for an hour in support of this cause is, frankly, naive in the extreme. Sure, turn off those desktops that are running all night when nobody is in the office. Yes, switch the lights off when you shut the door and go home. But switch off the Internet for an hour? Get a grip, people…