eWeek has a story, or rather four stories on the 100 most influential people in IT. The first installment counts down from 100 to 76. I find it incredibly annoying that they don't just list them out, but rather make you look at a slide show--the better to drive ad views, I presume.

This is biggest the complaint I have with ad supported models. Frequently the presentation is made a less effective communication because it's held hostage to the desire to drive ad views. I don't want to make poor decisions on what I say or how I say it because I'm trying to "capture more eyeballs."

The other annoying thing about this presentation is that there's no supporting data. One sentence is all you get about the person. Some of those are pretty generic. For example, for Cathy Tompkins, number 76, the site says:

CIO for one of the Baseline 500 companies for high IT productivity; advocate of a "keep it simple" philosophy.

I'm not picking on Cathy here, just the site. There are 499 other CIOs from the Baseline 500 and I'm sure that many of them have said "keep it simple" more than once. So, why Cathy and not one of the others?

What was the methodology? Who picked? What were the criteria? If that information's there, I couldn't find it easily.