'BusinessWeek' names the Web's top 25

(Credit: BusinessWeek)

Thank goodness. BusinessWeek's new 25 Most Influential People on the Web list is refreshingly free of blowhard bloggers, busty video babes, and those wacky people who don't seem to do anything except speak at conference after conference.

Most of the list, rather, consists of the really big guys: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, whose company acquired MySpace. Then there are legit Web pioneers like Digg founder Kevin Rose, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Because of the dominance of big names, it's a pretty unsurprising list. But there are a few interesting choices: BusinessWeek names Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the list, rather than founder Mark Zuckerberg; late-night comedian Jon Stewart, whose wildly popular The Daily Show on Comedy Central led (indirectly, and among other factors) to parent company Viacom's copyright suit against YouTube; and Jonathan Kaplan, whose Pure Digital Technologies created the low-end Flip camcorder, that device that has been pointed in the direction of so many cats.

But there were two sectors of Net influencers who were conspicuously missing: one, anybody from the porn industry (I hear that's kind of big on the Web); and two, prominent figures best known for hacking, spamming, and related online nastiness. Because bad guys can be a big deal too.

[heathergreen]

Hey Caroline,

Thanks for the shout out on our list. You nailed it, we were definitely trying to get a different mix. Oh and I take your point about the hackers and spammers and the porn folks, although my bet is that the porn folks won't make it on our list next year!