Loic Le Meur! Gabe Rivera! Joi Ito! Don't feel bad if you've never heard of them. BusinessWeek.com's latest 25 Most Influential People on the Web is a mashup of billionaire powerbrokers with a randomized handful of those folks you run into at that same little tech conference that happens under a different name every month. I'm guessing they left out TechCrunch's Michael Arrington to create buzz. If you don't want to click through 27 pageviews on BusinessWeek's site, here's the entire list in alphabetical order:

The digital revolution promised us that the nation state would wither away. But the spread of social networks show that however much the Internet connects us, quirks divide us. Take, for example, the inexplicable popularity of Twitter in Japan. Tokyo out-tweets New York and San Francisco combined. Pingdom, a website analyst, finds that Twitter is more intensely popular in Japan than in the United States. The conventional theories — Japan's high wireless usage, for example — fail to explain it.

The invite-only Fortune Brainstorm: Tech is taking over the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay through Wednesday. Dreadfully convenient for Robert Scoble, who lives in town; not for Japanese VC Joi Ito, who's jetting across the Pacific. The maelstrom of people and ideas includes the likes of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, the World Bank's Daniel Kaufmann and One Laptop per Child's Nicholas Negroponte. If your thought-leader status was somehow overlooked, fine-tune your leadership skills at tonight's East Bay Innovation Group. Organizational psychologist Peter Newton offers insight into how startups can grow strong and competent leadership. Ready for the next frontier? Klara Nahrstedt, a professor of Computer Science at Marc Andreessen's alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is in town indulging your sci-fi holodeck fantasies as she discusses Cisco's Teleimmersive Environment for Everybody.

The annual gathering of techies at Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp in Sebastopol is like Bohemian Grove but slightly less secretive. Want to know who was in and who was out? Investor Joi Ito's photos should give you an idea of who's who this year. Have a better caption? The best one will become the new headline. Friday's winner: "Two guys, one glass" by montoya. (Photo by Joi Ito)

Hyperglobal adventure capitalists Joi Ito and Esther Dyson met by coincidence at London Heathrow's just-opened Terminal 5, and raced to post photos of each other to Flickr. Before Yahoo bought the photo site, Dyson was an investor in Flickr. Suggest a caption in the comments. (Photos by Esther Dyson and Joi Ito)

Valleywag hears that LinkedIn, which has largely missed out on the social-networking buzz, is getting ready for its closeup. Employees were getting lensed today at a photo shoot, which is usually a sign that a company's about to get the cover treatment, or at least a major feature story, from a big business publication. Missing at the shoot, however, was LinkedIn founder and president of products Reid Hoffman, who recently stepped out of the LinkedIn CEO chair. Hoffman, a tipster says, is away in Shanghai, with friend Joi Ito, the Six Apart backer pictured here to his right, purportedly looking for new startups to invest in.

After Valleywag pointed out the unseemly appearance created when Six Apart funneling donations from users' purchases to charities tied to investor Joi Ito, the company — right in keeping with its recent problems living up to its ideals of transparency — never publicly conceded the existence of a conflict of interest. But today, Ito, to his supreme credit, did just that on his own blog — and even acknowledged Valleywag in the post. Well done, Joi. If only the blog-software company you backed could learn from your example.

LiveJournal, the online community run by blog-software maker Six Apart is rowdy, contentious, and mostly undeserving of attention. But occasionally its cantankerous users, in their perpetual, pointless war with Six Apart management, make a decent point. For example, this one: Why do three of the four nonprofits chosen to benefit from a recent sale of paid LiveJournal accounts have ties to early Six Apart investor Joi Ito? Ito no longer serves on Six Apart's board, but he's the CEO and founder of Neoteny, a Japanese venture capital firm which provided Six Apart with much of its initial backing. Neoteny chairman Jun Makihara has a board seat. And Six Apart CEO Barak Berkowitz previously worked for Neoteny. I'd never say the organizations Ito's linked to — the EFF, Creative Commons, and Witness — aren't doing good work. But it all seems very cozy. So cozy that the supposedly pro-transparency company didn't care to disclose the fact to customers.

Serial entrepreneur and investor Joi Ito, a terribly accomplished technologist, is introducing the audience at the Web 2.0 Summit to the communicative and social power of World of Warcraft. His points:

Forgive me for running a mere reprint, but this quote from angel investor and ICANN board member Joi Ito speaks enough about the world of tech that it needs no comment.

Marketer and pro-blogger advocate Curt Hopkins is a good and reasonable man. Good because he's running the Blogswana project, in which students will help those affected by AIDS in Africa tell the world about their plight. Reasonable because when he asked the following Valley people — people known as good souls with a passion for world-changing technology — for financial support, he expected a few yeses and a few nos.

Geeky investor Joi Ito says the new golf isn't extreme biking, it's World of Warcraft. [1up.com]
Pixar's taking over Toy Story 3, not shelving it. A power play against Lasseter, or can he wring more magic from the series? [Moviehole]
Google can keep a copy of your tax records, love letters, and porn folder, and they promise not to peek — as long as that's considered evil, anyway. [EFF]
Get in on the ground floor (or own a piece of doomed software history) — order a Flockstar tee. [Factory Joe]
Homeland Security saves the Internet from hackers and, um, bloggers in a simulation. They probably cheated and skipped the "Cory Doctorow of Mass Destruction" simulation. [Newsvine]