Important People #1 through #5

Photograph: Courtesy of Google

1. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin
Executives, Google

Whenyour stock price can top $500 a share, you're collectively worth $33billion in cash, and you run the most trafficked search engine on theInternet, you can afford to do, well, pretty much whatever you want.Sergey Brin and Larry Page's little project from Stanford has growninto the Web's most talked-about powerhouse, and one of the few nameson this list to have morphed into a verb. Schmidt left Novell to jointhe board of directors at Googlein 2001 and soon became the company's CEO. Having conquered the onlineadvertising world, Google seems to be gearing up for an acquisitionspree, its headline-grabbing purchase of YouTube marking a big steptoward complete domination of the Web.

Photograph: Courtesy of Apple

2. Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple

No doubt you're sick of the media bonanza surrounding the every move of Apple's CEO, but when one man's appeal for DRM-free musicreverberates around the world, it's hard to ignore the power he wields.Jobs popularized legal music downloads and legal TV and moviedownloads. And though the iPhone won't be released for five months, itsdemonstration at Macworld Expo suggested that this product mightfinally popularize Internet browsing on a mobile device.

Photograph: Courtesy of BitTorrent

3. Bram Cohen
Cofounder, BitTorrent

P2P systems like KaZaA and eDonkey are so last year. The future is all about BitTorrent,the brainchild of math wizard and programming wunderkind Bram Cohen.BitTorrent, developed in 2001, has gained in popularity as a way todownload large files (like movies) by sharing the burden acrosshardware and bandwidth. The technology's adeptness at handling largefiles got Cohen in trouble with the Motion Picture Association ofAmerica, which ordered BitTorrent to remove copyrighted content fromits network. But that setback hasn't slowed it down. Reportedly, morethan a third of all Web traffic now comes from BitTorrent clients.BitTorrent and the entertainment heavyweights have since joined forces.The newly released BitTorrent Entertainment Network launched recentlywith thousands of industry-approved movies, television shows, games,and songs for sale and rental.

Photograph: Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment

4. Mike Morhaime
President, Blizzard Entertainment

In the world of online gaming, there is World of Warcraftand there is everything else. With 8 million players worldwide,Blizzard earns about $1.5 billion a year on WoW. And each player isbreathlessly beholden to Mike Morhaime for the chance--if it evercomes--to obtain that Blade of Eternal Justice. As with Second Life(see #17),entire real-world businesses are based around the game. Unlike SecondLife, though, these businesses--which exploit the WoW economy andgameplay--are not entirely welcome.

Photograph: Andrew Lih

5. Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia

Many onliners treat Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as their first and last stop in researching a topic; and its user generated content has become so reliable that Nature magazine declared it "close to [Encyclopaedia] Britannica"in accuracy. The site has been cited as a source of information in morethan 100 U.S. court decisions since 2004. But its popularity has alsomade Wikipedia a target for spammers--so much so that Wikipediatemporarily blocked the entire country of Qatar from making edits. Tothwart spammers, Wales decided to slap "nofollow" tags on externallinks, telling search engines to ignore the links in order to avoidartificially inflating the search engine ranking of the link targets.This strategy ensures that Wikipedia's prominence in search resultswill continue to grow. But Wikipedia may just be the beginning forWales. He recently launched his own search engine, Wikia Search, whichsearches only sites mentioned in Wikipedia.