Honestly, you can make a pretty good case for it, if you view him as the central locus for 4-chan's meme-spawning. I guess the questions to ask are "Do lolcats and the like count as influence?" and "How much of a percentage of the world is the internet?" and maybe, "Can internet denizens answer either of the preceding questions objectively?"
There's not just the meme-thing. If 4chan doesn't like you or your website it's going down. It's nasty, but certainly influential. It's not just the net, there's leakage into the real world. what would be annonymous, as in the we hate scientology club, without 4chan? It's easy to overestimate the influence of 4chan, but it's there and it's easily underestimated as well.
I must say I'm not that surprised by the outcome of the vote. Anything on-line is susceptible to some sort of "vote-rigging". What I'm actually pleased about is the way TIME is dealing with the outcome. Both the fact that they say he's a worthy winner exactly because of the "rigging" and the fact that on-line polls almost by definition are suspect. Now that's fair and balanced reporting.
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