A Blogging A-List?

I don’t know Doc Searls well, but I generally respect and his thoughts and style. Last week I got to know him a little better at Demo www.demo.com, where I got to enjoy a few amiable chats with him. Just a few days after, I was editing Conferenza coverage of the O’Reilly Conference’s Digital Democracy Teach-In . It was neat to have Ernie the Attorney , another respected blogger cover the conference, which examined blogging's potential in the electoral process.

The Digital Democracy consensus was that people liked Dean's campaign more than they liked him, which is just about the way I saw it. Doc, who usually speaks in golden nuggets of insight, quipped that the pro-Dean bloggers were no among blogging’s “A-List.”

I found the comment disturbing and surprisingly elitist. Blogging, it seems to me, is supposed to be the “Great Democratizer,” where everyone is enabled to have their say and the technology gives them the mechanism to be heard.

In addition, it seems to me blogging will be poorly served if we allow it to be structured around a ruling elite, an A-List who influences most, not by superior thinking or a clearer voice, but by high ratings. This is what went wrong with CBS news, who years ago opted to lower its quality to raise its ratings. This is what always seems to go wrong when new media is developed.

A blogging A-List? Say it isn’t so, Doc.

Comments

[Russ]

The A-List has a term that's been around for a while. They're the individual blogs that have the most links to them: http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/top100.html . This blog, for example, has 9 other weblogs pointing at it. Doc Searls, however has 2150 blogs pointing at it, and even more links. There's definitely a vast gulf between your average weblogger and the A-Listers.

-Russ

[Shannon Clark]

To an extent it is a literal truth that there is a "power law" in action with respect to popular websites, blogs very much included.

Once a site gets popular (however this happens), many people (by definition) read it. Some percentage of them will then link back to the site (generally seen as a vote "for" the site though there has been discussions that this should not always be the case).

As a result, even more people, the audiance of this second circle of sites linking to the first, now are exposed to the link to the initial site, and they too then have a strong probability of following that link and then, perhaps, linking to the initial site as well.

Extend this over a period of time, during which the initial site stays relevant and of interest to many people (typically by being updated with interesting content, but in a few case such as goats.cx no updates were needed), and the initial site will be established as a site linked to by many people.

A second, relevant point, comes into play here as well. Without aggregators most people only monitor a small number of sites on a regular basis (I would posit less than ten is typical), once they "fill" these slots with interesting sites, it takes a great deal for a new site to displace them (in my case, for years I read Slashdot, now I read BoingBoing and Anil Dash's blogs for much the same effect, but faster and earlier).

The vast majority of blogs are read by a small number of people, typically personally connected to the author.

Above this tier is a large group of blogs that have built in audiances (journalists, authors, notables such as Moby or Neil Gaiman etc).

At the very top are a fairly small number of sites (many written not by one person but by a group such as Platic or BoingBoing) which are read by a very, very large number of people.

The actual figures are, however, tricky. Links are not a 1-to-1 measure of readers (I read far more blogs and blog entries than I link to on my personal or business blogs). Not all links are ever followed (archived entries get rarely read, side bar links are folled less than new entry links, etc)

Anyway, all interesting phenomenon and why I study Networks.

Shannon

[John]

I guess its natural for animals to see who's top dog and not waste time with the weak, especially if one feels weak oneself. Im not convinced that the best or most important are the most popular, if I did I'd consult Neilson and other ratings before I acted. And Im not sure that the most popular show are the most influential - what was the impact on social or political relations of 3s company or soap operas anyway?

So if Im reading his comment correctly, Doc Searls may be off the mark here: the Dean Campaign tapped into a liberal version of the moral majority, who arent swayed by conventional media. That they arent part of an A list is natural; if anything, that fact makes their potential energy all the greater.