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.”

http://jeremiahthewebprophet.blogspot.com/2006/01/my-conclusions-on-listers-they-do.html

Jeremiah

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.

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…

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.

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.