Leader: Who's setting tech's agenda this year?

Wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has walked away with this year's top Agenda Setter accolade, according to the aggregated votes from silicon.com's panel of experts.

Fair? What do you think?

Zuckerberg continues a trend that has - by a nose - seen a new face top the poll for each of the eight years silicon.com has run this project. Sure, the likes of Steve Jobs at Apple in second place or Eric Schmidt from Google at 3 have almost reached the summit twice but no one ever has.

But, with Zuckerberg, has a massive tidal wave of social networking, with Facebook riding it, led to a novelty winner? Someone who, to cite the Agenda Setter criteria, won't have longevity or enough global influence? Again, our judges clearly thought he hit the right buttons - but feel free to use the voting next to each biog and let us work out who you'd have preferred to see at the top.

And for new names altogether email us at editorial@silicon.com.

In short, the question we are getting to here - which we must get to most years - is this: how much is this poll about the individual and how much is it about where they work?

Listening to the judges as they convened, for those of us who were there or who have read the transcript, it is obvious that all too often people start with a trend, work their way back to a company at the forefront of that trend, and then single out an individual - often said company's CEO.

That's not ideal. Far better to start with the individual. After all, people can exist without organisations such as governments or companies but those organisations can't exist without people.

Zuckerberg is a bet on the future - a 23-year-old with a lot more proving to do. Unlike, say, Rupert Murdoch at 29, a man whose longevity as a trend setter and as a silicon.com Agenda Setter stretches out behind him. He is the only individual to make every poll, across the years.

Looking down the 50 names, in this brief space it is worth highlighting a few key trends and the individuals who often personify them.

For a publication that writes for many CIOs, it is encouraging to see so many users of IT featuring this year - more than in any past year.

From Paul Coby at 11 and Bill Maguire at 25 - airline CIOs at BA and Virgin America respectively - to Rorie Devine at 26 over at Betfair and even the BBC's Ashley Highfield at 5 and BT's JP Rangaswami at 48 - two whose time is also spent providing technology platforms - the names stand out. See Andy McCue's analysis on this subject here.

And some would argue that a CIO, as an Agenda Setter, is much more about the individual than a Silicon Valley CEO.

And while the Valley and the US in general retains a huge presence, another notable trend that the names highlight is the rise of Asia - mainly China and India but also from further afield. See Tony Hallett's analysis on this here.

Trends that past Agenda Setters polls have previously brought to the surface are also present. For example, there is the steady march - as opposed to revolution - of open source and free software. Stalwarts in these areas such as Bruce Perens at 39, Linus Torvalds at 44 and Richard Stallman at 40 all make the list and not for the first time. Read about them in Gemma Simpson's analysis here.

Then there is the world of communications. Lots of big names in this area - if you were to be led by the companies they work for, perhaps - are absent, but it's another year for Niklas Zennström near the top of the list at 7, while Cisco's John Chambers is back to his influential best, charting at 4. More on the comms world here.

And finally, there are the names you might not recognise and those that are very much up and coming, such as 22-year-old Blake Ross at 49, who worked on developing the Mozilla Firefox browser as a teenager - more open source - before founding a company he just sold to Facebook.

Too early to say he's an Agenda Setter? You could say the same thing about Zuckerberg - and look where he ended up.

Click here to view the 2007 Agenda Setters special report, including the full top 50 list, along with exclusive analysis of the results.