The most commonly cited birth date of Web 2.0 is October 2004, which saw the opening of the first Web 2.0 Conference organized by Tim O’Reilly, who is also credited with coining the oft-used term.

But because the Web 2.0 Conference was organized as a response to something else, I feel it’s more accurate to regard October of 2004 as the date of Web 2.0’s christening, with the actual date of birth having occurred some months earlier.

One solid candidate for the blessed event: May 2004, with the publication of The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki — a book less about any particular new internet technology than the ability of the internet to aggregate the contributions of diverse members of groups which, when combined, might yield more value than the contributions of any single member.  Surowiecki’s ideal was enormously influential on the ethos of the Silicon Valley digerati, and clearly shaped much of the thinking that ultimately created the social web.

But look beneath the surface of The Wisdom of Crowds and you’ll find an important shortcoming, which, as one might expect, has been faithfully reproduced within the philosophy of the movement it has so greatly informed.

Specifically, in his book, Surowiecki approaches crowds with the assumption that each member, however diverse, has one thing in common: a desire to “get it right” with respect to finding solutions to whatever challenges they jointly face.

But what happens when some members of the crowd want to get it wrong? Even worse, what happens when these happen to be hackers with too much time on their hands? Can the influence of a few outliers alter the apparent will of the masses?

The results of the Time 100 precision votehack: “marblecake also the game”

The answer is yes, as demonstrated by the example of Time Magazine and the recently-closed crowd-sourced portion of its ranking of the 100 most influential people of 2009 (the Time 100).

By the time the more than 100 million votes were counted, President Obama was ranked 37^th and former-President George W. Bush 75^th, while the relatively unknown owner of web imageboard 4chan.com, identified only by the pseudonym “moot”, won the voting by an unprecedented landslide.

Not only that, but spots 2 through 21 were populated by a group of names which, while more recognizable than “moot”, hardly represent the world’s most influential.

Instead of crowd-sourced, you might say the Time 100 got crowd-scorched, as a relatively small number of loyal 4chan.com users developed and applied a “precision hack” to the voting process calculated not only to land moot firmly atop the list, but to also assign the following 20 spots to nominees whose first initials combined to spell “marblecake also the game,” a dual reference to a pair of 4chan.com’s many in-jokes.

For its part, Time.com made a few attempts at minimizing the vote hijacking, but the hackers adapted, won, and as a result, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr now likely think they’re much more influential here than our own recently-elected president (but not more popular than Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud).

Admittedly, the outcome of the 2009 Time 100 vote hack is of little consequence in the end. But it does serve to highlight what I regard as the Achilles heel of the internet in general and the social web in particular: anonymity, and the tendency of the anonymous to behave anti-socially, rendering the crowd much less “wise” in the process.

Wikipedia is often held up as the pinnacle of crowd-generated wisdom, and frequently compared to vibrant open source software movements. In theory, that comparison is valid, but in practice, it frequently is not.

In order for one’s contribution to an open source software community to be integrated into the larger project, it must be objectively reviewed, tested, and shown to represent an improvement. Because open source coders almost always submit under their real names, they are further motivated to do good work based on the impact it will have on their real-world reputations.

On the other hand, the key to an enduring acceptance of one’s contributions to Wikipedia – where many editors prize anonymity above almost all else – is often as simple as exhibiting a genuine indifference to the opinions and feelings of other editors. This is the exact opposite of what leads to success in the identity-mediated real world, and antithetical the ideal of wise crowds.

Simply put, in order for the social web to reach its full potential, a solution to the anonymity problem must be found. Until then, the wisdom of crowds is always at risk of being usurped by a czardom of clods.