(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.
eBay announced Monday that it has appointed new CEOs to its Skype and Shopping.com properties. At the helm of telephony company Skype will be current Shopping.com president and former Evite co-founder and CEO Josh Silverman; taking his place at Shopping.com will be Andre Haddad, who joined eBay in 2001 when it acquired his start-up, the European marketplace site iBazar.
This continues an extensive management shakeup at the online commerce giant, which saw the departure of longtime CEO Meg Whitman in January. eBay itself has been going through some tough times, with seller dissatisfaction leading to a boycott over fee hikes and new rules.
Meanwhile, many questioned whether Skype was a smart acquisition for eBay in the first place when the company disclosed a $1.4 billion write-down last year to handle Skype-related charges. Skype also suffered a two-day outage in the summer of 2007.
Silverman will replace interim Skype CEO Michael van Swaaij, who was appointed to the post in October when co-founder Niklas Zennstrom (now at the helm of Joost) left the post amid the $1.4 billion snafu.
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