There is no A-list.
Doc Searls and Seth Finkelstein have been discussing the hierarchy in the blogosphere. Doc Searls is claiming that, “the Internet blew away the porches of membership. You don’t need to bark at a door you can just as easily walk around.” He’s claiming that there are no gatekeepers regulating the popularity of blogs.
Seth contends that when an A-lister slags a Z-lister, the Z-lister has no effective means of response.
I contend that there is no A-list or Z-list. I have Seth’s blog and Doc Searl’s blog in my RSS reader (Sage, an extension to Firefox). Until a recent post from Seth, I couldn’t have told you who had more readers. I read about 30 blogs on a regular basis, and only 4 or 5 are in the Technorati Top 100. As far as I’m concerned, Seth and I are sitting at the top of the Pingswepterati. Seth Finkelstein, you are on my A-list.
Contrast this with the situation 10 years ago: me versus the Boston Globe. I had an English teacher in high school who was arrested for some depravity involving kids. The Boston Globe ran an article that printed the lurid details of the accusations against him, before any trial had occurred. They failed to mention that he was a monolith of English teaching for 20 years at my high school.
I wrote a letter to the Globe saying something along the lines of, “If he’s a child molester, he should go to jail, but so far these are just accusations. He was a great teacher; don’t ignore his brilliant history just to sell papers.” They didn’t print the letter, and I felt like I had no recourse. (Incidentally, he did go to jail, and he was still one of the best teachers I’ve ever had.) In this case, I was such a Z-lister that literally nobody heard my complaint. I couldn’t even find out if the Globe received my letter, never mind printing it.
Compare that to Stephen Kurkjian’s recent smear campaign against former Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn. I’m as much of a Z-lister as you can get (Technorati rank: 843,855 and rising, baby!), but if you Google his name, the third result is my response to his shameful article about Peter Quinn. It’s tailed off a bit now, but for a while, a large fraction of the traffic to my site was from that link.
I think that’s a great change. Sure, we still have the echo effects of top 100 lists reinforcing the popularity of the top 100, but that doesn’t make the top 100 gatekeepers. It sounds trite, but blogs have actually given a soapbox to the unwashed millions with internet access. It could be better, but it’s still only 2006. (Hey, I even have a hotline to the NSA installed in my house, thanks to Mr. Bush and his illiterate assistant, Michael Hayden!)
I’d love to hear a suggestion of how we could spread people’s attention away from the “A-listers,” but so far, I don’t find my attention too strongly drawn to them.
February 13th, 2006 at 12:33 AM
While I appreciate all the readers I have, thank you, sadly “Until a recent post from Seth, I couldn’t have told you who had more readers”, doesn’t change the fact that the numbers are what they are. You might not have known who had more money, me or Bill Gates - but that wouldn’t change the amounts we had.
The basic reason your post ranks high for Stephen Kurkjian is because he doesn’t care much about the Internet, so he barely has a presence on it. If he did care, his power with the Boston Globe would bury the position of your post, on Google. To state the obvious, there can only be ten top-ten results. You only have one such result because nobody with higher “gatekeeperness” wants them - not because of any great ability to reply.
It doesn’t do any good to rant on soapbox if nobody hears (unless a person just likes ranting on a soapbox, some do). And having so many ranters leadd to gatekeepers, which amplifies certain voices, and hence others are marginalized.
February 13th, 2006 at 1:29 AM
It’s interesting that 4 to 5 of your regular RSS feeds are in the Technorati top 100. That’s actually quite a high percentage. If there is no A-list, then I find it an amazing that out of 27.7 million blogs on Technorati, you just happen to coincidentally share 17% of your feeds with Techorati’s top 100 rankings.
Clearly, some are better than others.
The real thing “A-listers” do is set standards. Any new blogger will find that most A-listers are trying hard to be good journalists, for the most part try to develop good arguments, with researched facts. Maybe we should call them “A-grade” not “A-listers”, but I think it is a very useful concept to have people to look up to, and to emulate. No, it shouldn’t be exclusive. Yes, the long-tail of niche blogs is a useful compliment to the ones at the top. But, to try to flatten the blogosphere and say “all are equal, there is no A-list” isn’t quite right either.
February 13th, 2006 at 5:20 AM
The trick is in the wrist……
Doc Searls has pretty much had it with the discussion on gatekeeping and A-listers, yadayada. This is understandable. (If you’ve missed all or part of this discussion, as I did, check Doc’s post for a roundup.)
I’d just read Dave Wi…
February 13th, 2006 at 6:17 AM
As long as people intend to make money with their blogs, there will be rank and lists. Their attention will always be on the A-list. Climb and claw up the food chain.
The underlying assumption here is that size matters, numbers count. But once bloggers come to realize that there really isn’t any amount of money to be made with their blogs (echoing Doc here - and, relative to return on time elsewhere, I mean, maybe if you’re making six bucks and hour, you could actually make more blogging…) people wil stop fretting about this shit.
Delete your sitemeter, ignore technorati as a measuring tool, and don’t even think about google ads. It’s all small change anyway.
Good post. Still, being heard is fine but effecting change is another matter altogether.
February 13th, 2006 at 7:20 AM
I also noticed the same thing as well. there is no specific criteria to define an alister.
http://jeremiahthewebprophet.blogspot.com/2006/01/my-conclusions-on-listers-they-do.html
Jeremiah
February 13th, 2006 at 9:16 AM
Regarding Brandon Stafford’s recent post on A-list bloggers:
843,855 is actually pretty good. My Technorati ranking is positive infinity; that is, the influence of my blog on the global “discussion” is so vanishingly small that they won’t even rank or index it.
I basically agree with your assessment. The A-list bloggers are like the popular kids in high school — who cares? This actually reminds me of a funny remark you once made to me in a parking lot in downtown Palo Alto a few years ago. This was back in the Web 1.0 era, when we could still pretend to have at least some semblance of personal privacy, and I was explaining to you a dilemma I faced: I liked the TiVo service but was unsure about having a third party track all my viewing habits. (What if they find that I like Gilmore Girls? I’ll get beaten up and shoved in a locker.) So you said, “Why don’t you just use the same trick I use? TiVo doesn’t store data about me in their database.”
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“I just don’t use their service.”
February 17th, 2006 at 12:59 PM
[...] Seth Finkelstein responded to my Stephen Kurkjian example my last post with this point, “You only have one such result because nobody with higher ‘gatekeeperness’ wants them - not because of any great ability to reply.” [...]