Following is the list of top 10 most influential people who have proven themselves as trend-setters of the web. The list was compiled based on the information available online.

1. Mark Zuckerberg

Mark has redefined what MySpace started a few years ago and has taken social networking to a whole another level. With over 41 million registered users, Facebook has become a different world where people just ‘hang-out’ boycotting the rest of the web.

2 . Michael Arrington

Mike is the founder and editor of TechCrunch.com, one of the most popular blogs devoted to startups and new web technologies. Since Mike started TechCrunch in June of 2005, it has become a must read must-read in the fast-growing Web 2.0 world. His posts are so influential that they have been rumored to easily make or break a start-up’s success.

3. Kevin Rose

Kevin founded the famous Digg.com, a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. Digg revolutionized the way news was read by empowering site-visitors to choose and vote on news they deemed read-worthy.

4. Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Google. Period.

5. Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs innovative thought process led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. Apple’s latest release, Leopard, has been ranked by many critics as a far better performing OS than Vista. iPod, iTunes, iPhone…need I say more?

6. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim

Chad, Steve and Jawed, who were all early employees of founded YouTube in 2005. By making the video-sharing process much easier and simple, YouTube revolutionized the way users uploaded, viewed and shared video clips.

7. Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson

Chris and Tom founded MySpace in August 2003. MySpace is currently the largest social-networking website and is credited for beginning the wild-social-networking-craze even though Facebook has been gaining popularity at a much faster pace recently.

8. Jason Calacanis

Jason is CEO and co-founder of Weblogs Inc., a network of widely read blogs. He generated a lot of buzz in the blogosphere when he sold his network of blogs to AOL for $25 million in 2005.

9. Markus Frind

Markus is widely known for single-handedly running the dating-site Plenty Of Fish. He often gets quoted when people talk about adsense earnings. According to this article, his site is on track to bring in over $10 million in revenue next year - that is over $30,000 per day.

10. Alex Tew

The Million Dollar Homepage was founded by Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from England, to help raise money for his university education. The website is said to have generated a gross income of $1,037,100 USD by selling one million pixels on the homepage of the site for $1 each. His success sparked a number of other similar sites selling words, links, wiki pages and anything else you can think of.

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One of the most popular celebrity on the Internet, Cindy, is a desired Supermodel, an accomplished host, producer and actress. She brings huge publicity to her projects and is a perennial favorite of talk, entertainment and radio shows. Cindy is a self -made icon of the Twenty-First Century.

Margolis emerged as a star in the early days of the Internet. She was named Yahoo! Internet Life magazine’s “Queen of the Internet” from 1996-1999. She also found her way into the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records as a result of being the “most downloaded” person in 1999. At the age of 34, the peak of her popularity, she was downloaded 70,000 times in a span of 24 hours.

In an April 2006 interview with The Washington Post, Margolis discussed her nude photo session for the December 2006 issue of Playboy, saying that she had posed for Playboy many times in the past, but never full frontal nude. She cited her good looks at age 40 and wanting to be an inspiration to mothers and women her age as the reason she chose to finally pose nude. “It will be fun to go up against the 20-year-olds and show them that they don’t have anything on me!” she told the AP. In an interview with EXTRA she said that Desperate Housewives had been an inspiration for her as it showed that mothers her age can also be fit and sexy. Margolis’ nude pictorial was published in the December 2006 issue of Playboy. A portion of the proceeds from issues sold will go to a charity for which Margolis is a spokesperson, Resolve. The charity aims to get fertility treatment better covered by insurance companies. Read More…

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Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of eleven books. She is also co-host of “Left, Right & Center,” public radio’s popular political roundtable program. In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

Arianna is widely popular online for launching The Huffington Post, a politically liberal online news website and aggregated weblog featuring hyperlinks to various news sources and columnists. The Huffington Post was launched on May 9, 2005 as a news and commentary outlet. Its roster of bloggers includes many people from Arianna Huffington’s extensive network of prominent “friends.” It is one of the most popular weblog overall as measured by web links and the most popular “Analysis and Opinion” web site as measured by web hits.In August 2006, it was announced that Softbank Capital would invest $5 million in the online news site, which has grown dramatically popular in only a year, to help expand it.The site now has invested in Vlogging, with many of the site contributors contributing via video, and capturing clips in the media and posting them on the site. (Source…)

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Darren Rowse, is a full-time blogger, co-founder of LivingRoom, co-founder and vice-president of b5media, co-founder of the Six Figure Blogging course, speaker, blog consultant, and founder of ProBlogger. Rowse currently lives and works in his Melbourne, Australia home, is married to “V” and has one son. Read More…

Darren maintains over twenty different blogs covering a wide array of topics. However, his main attention online comes from Problogger.net. This site is dedicated to helping other bloggers learn the skills of blogging, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium. The site was started in September 2004 to keep record of what Darren was learning about blogging for money. It currently has well over 3500 articles, tips, tutorials and case studies. He recently co-founded b5media, a blog-network, which hosts over 200 blogs and is one of the largest new media networks with over 1 million page views a day.

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Jessica Lee Rose, also known online as lonelygirl15 (her screenname in YouTube), is an American-born actress who grew up in New Zealand. She rose to popularity after playing the role of lonelygirl15, a fictional teenage homeschooled character named Bree who appeared in YouTube with a series of episodes.

To millions of online fans, she was first known as Bree, a 16-year-old, home-schooled American teenager. Unusually self-possessed and literate, Bree recorded her private thoughts into a digital video camera and posted them on YouTube under the name Lonelygirl15, where she attracted millions of fans. In August 2006, the videos were exposed as scripted fakes, and Bree was outed as 19-year old New Zealand-born actress Jessica Rose. But the news only served to increase her fame, and in the media, Rose became the poster child for the phenomenal success of YouTube and user-driven Web content. Rose’s star continues to climb: she’s landing movie deals and recorded a commercial for a United Nations anti-poverty campaign. (Source…)

Here is an interesting episode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZN-Wye4rDE

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Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, popularly known as the “Fuggers” are authors of the popular blog “Go Fug Yourself”. Initially Jessica and Heather created the site just for themselves and their close friends. However, it quickly became popular as the girls and the content of the site were loved and shared by all.

As their FAQ states, they should be applauded for a very strategic use of word “fugly” (referring to ‘fucking ugly’). “ Fugly … is a self-inflicted state, and no one seems to excel at dwelling in the depths of fug quite like pretty people with money to spare and little sense of how to spend it.”

Their blog commonly talks about celebrities and their fashion disasters. Celebrities frequently mentioned in the blog include Courtney Love, Kevin Federline, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bai Ling, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Bobby Trendy, Ashley Peldon and Courtney Peldon, among others.

The Fuggers were able to get Go Fug Yourself named one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 favorite entertainment sites in its June 23, 2006 issue. Vanity Fair named it a ‘site [they] can’t get enough of’ on July 2006 and The Wall Street Journal featured them on the front page on September 2005.

TV appearances: Guests of Joan and Melissa Rivers on the Grammy Awards Fashion Wrap, the Academy Awards Fashion Wrap, and the Emmy Awards Fashion Wrap, 2006, TV Guide Channel; Awesomely Badder Fashion for VH-1 in November 2004.

Also mentioned in/on: The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, profiled in Los Angeles magazine, the New York Post, The Village Voice, profiled in French Vogue, Canada’s National Post newspaper, Defamer.com, the Hollywood Reporter (”viciously funny duo”), Variety, Gawker.com, Slate.com, Salon.com, MSN.com, Zap2It.com, LA.com, National Public Radio, Australian and Italian Cosmopolitan, The Boston Herald, Details magazine, Time Out Chicago, uk.gay.com.

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“My name is Heather B. Armstrong. Some of you may remember me as Heather B. Hamilton. I am married to a charming geek named Jon. We live in Salt Lake City, Utah, with our three-year-old daughter, Leta Elise, and our five-year-old dog, Chuck.

I am a Stay at Home Mom (SAHM) or a Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker. I do both equally well.

In a previous life I was a web designer. I lived in Los Angeles, California, for several years where I worked for drug-addicted executives and discovered what life was like as a recovering Mormon. This means that life was filled with PowerPoint templates and lethal amounts of tequila. I dated several actors and met a handful of celebrities. Everything you’ve ever heard about Los Angeles is absolutely true, especially the parts about traffic and actors: they really are that bad.” More about her…

In 2002, Armstrong ignited a fierce debate about privacy issues when she was fired from her job as a web designer and graphic artist because she had written satirical accounts of her experiences at a dot-com startup on her weblog, dooce.com . She did not challenge her termination and has refrained from identifying her place of employment in interviews.
Armstrong warns her fellow bloggers:

I started this website in February 2001. A year later I was fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace. My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID.

Armstrong’s domain name has since become an internet neologism: to be “dooced” is to lose one’s job as a result of something one wrote on the internet.

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Watch out for a new face of TopWebCelebrities.com where you submit, you vote and you decide who is hot online!

Launching soon!

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Mario Lavandeira, popularly known as Perez Hilton, has been very successful in running Hollywood’s most hated website PerezHilton.com. He was recently ranked number two on Forbes list of top 25 web celebrities.

Hollywood stars fear the wrath of Perez Hilton, a controversial gossip-monger with a poison pen and hugely popular Web site. Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, styles himself “The Queen of Mean” and has earned a rabid following thanks to his snarky voice and irreverent habits–like doodling rude captions on paparazzi photos. Critics say he plays favorites, particularly Paris and Nicky Hilton, who are rarely portrayed in a bad light. And Hollywood photo agency X17 is suing him for copyright infringement, claiming he posts its photos without permission. But the blog is still a hit, and Hilton has even gained a measure of offline fame: He’s frequently cited as a source or appears in person on television programs ranging from ABC’s Good Morning America to MTV’s New Year’s Eve special.

Despite his success, he has been constantly criticized for using photos without payment, permission or credit to others. Here is an interesting video on You Tube where Perez is having a heated conversation with a photographer.

According to Wikipedia, Lavandeira’s professional occupations before blogging included some acting work, a stint as a publicist, and writing for gay publications. He started blogging “because it seemed easy.”

He has also been getting attention for “Outing Celebrities“.

On July 26, 2006, Lance Bass officially came out as gay, and Lavandeira received criticism for having been partially responsible. “It upsets me that people think what I’m doing is a bad thing,” Lavandeira told Access Hollywood. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing. If you know something to be a fact, why not report it? Why is that still taboo?” On November 2, 2006, another celebrity often questioned by Hilton for remaining closeted, Neil Patrick Harris, revealed that he is gay. Prominent members of the gay community who have criticised Lavandeira’s outing tactics include Arts & Entertainment Editor of The Advocate Corey Scholibo, actor Bruce Vilanch, and Damon Romine, spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

Other celebrities who Lavandeira frequently calls on to come out of the closet, despite that many of them maintain they are heterosexual, include Anderson Cooper, Jodie Foster, Kevin Spacey, Clay Aiken, Queen Latifah, Ricky Martin, Matt Dallas, Wentworth Miller, Richard Simmons, and Sean Hayes.

Despite ups and downs, his success in the blogosphere is undeniable, where, he constantly trashes, humiliates and makes fun of celebrities. No matter what he says, his readers just seem to adore him.

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