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This article by Mark Wrafter of VISION first appeared in the Sunday Business Post, Ireland on April 6th 2003.

It started with a simple e-mail, but ended up catapulting an obscure Irish footballer into a competition to name the most influential person of the century.

In early July 1999, a bored office worker in Ireland sent an e-mail to his friends. He had visited the website of Juventus, the Italian football club, and saw it was conducting an online poll to select the most promising newcomer to the team.

"Hey if you've never heard of Ronnie O'Brien, he's a young Irish footballer who, after being let go by Middlesborough, was unbelievably signed by Juventus a couple of months back. He needs your help. Go on, vote for Ronnie, it's your duty as a patriot. Please send this to bored Irish people. Thanks, Eoin."

Little did Eoin, whose identity is still not known, know what he had started. By the following week O'Brien was one of the most famous footballers on the planet.

Like a chain letter, people forwarded the e-mail to friends; within hours it ended up on the computer screens of the Irish all around the world. O'Brien shot up from last to first on the poll, with 32% of the total vote.

In one 24-hour period, Ireland's relationship with the Internet had changed utterly. It was revolutionary. It had done for us something no other media had ever been able to do. The web grew us an instant community. It did so because the Internet is the only media that allows its users to communicate with each other directly, publicly and instantly, be that one-to-one or one-to-many.

The O'Brien success prompted his fans to set their sights even higher. In August 1999, Time magazine in the United States conducted an Internet poll to find the Person of the Century. Why not Ronnie O'Brien, they thought? A new volley of e-mails was sent out.

Ronnie vaulted his way to the top of the standings, beating out such notables as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King and Yitzhak Rabin. O'Brien was unaware of the fuss. The former supermarket shelf stacker from Bray found out from his agent a few days later that he was jostling Mother Teresa for greatness. Then, mysteriously, there was a computer crash, a result Time said, of too many people voting online at once.

Instead of being named Person of the Century, O'Brien was taken out of the running, because Time officials said not enough people had heard of him. The official rules stated, "whimsical candidates will not be counted." The US magazine didn't welcome the prospect of having O'Brien on the cover of their Person of the Century issue.

The reaction at the time to O'Brien's demotion was heated. The Irish set about plotting how to dupe the publication again by getting another Irish person to the top of the list.

Ireland's office staff hit back, voting in their thousands for Dustin the Turkey, proclaiming him a great visionary. Within hours the e-mails where again winging their way to Time's US headquarters.

The stuffed ex-presidential candidate polled over 1,000 more votes than Adolf Hitler.

Time eventually realised something was amiss and restricted the nomination to a pre-selected 100 candidates, with Albert Einstein eventually winning.

It was a defining moment for online polls. Never again would a site, unless it was its expressed wish, leave open their voting criteria in such a fashion. It's only the very naïve that do so today, but having to protect against it pre-99 was unheard of.

SligoBrewer wrote: »

http://media2.guzer.com/animations/100_people.swf