Inspired by O’Reilly Radar’s periodic short links post, I thought I would share the most interesting (read: poignant, amusing, thought provoking) links I come across on the web on a weekly basis. Here are this week’s:

Hacking TIME’s Most Influential Person poll: Great inside look on a massive job that took place to hack’s TIME’s reCAPTCHA algorithm. Amazing how they optimized each step to finish the hack in time.

Twitter Growth: More than doubling its user growth in 1 quarter thanks to the likes of Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Oprah.

Designing a new Ad Product: Interesting analysis on how to design and implement a new ad product done by imeem. With the ad industry so much in flux, approaches like this seem to be the best bet to optimize advertising for a given product/medium.

SickCity: A cool and aptly timed use to twitter data. Twitter’s promise lies in these long tail categorizations and groupings of the millions and millions of tweets in their database, as a function of time and location.