Are A-List Bloggers Unknown?
Posted on May 27, 2005
John C. Dvorak, who writes a column for PC Magazine says that A-list bloggers are unheard outside of their own self-congratulatory community:
The influential bloggers should be defined here. These are people whom you've never heard of, but whom other influential A-list utopianist bloggers all know. I reckon there are about 500 of them. He (or she) influences other like-minded bloggers, creating a groupthink form of critical mass, just like atomic fission, as they bounce off each other with repetitive cross-links: trackback links, self-congratulatory links, confirmations, and praise-for-their-genius links. BOOM! You get a formidable explosion-an A-bomb of groupthink. You could get radiation sickness if you happen to be in the area. Except for Wired online and a few media bloggers, nobody is in the area, so nobody outside the groupthink community really cares about any of this. These explosions are generally self-contained and harmless to the environment.A post on Blog Business Summit points out that some of the A-list bloggers like Joi Ito, Robert Scoble, Clay Shirky and Doc Searls have hundreds of thousands of references to them on Google while John C. Dvorak has a smaller but still impressive 60,000 references. However, it is hard to determine how significant that is because there is no way to measure the quality of these references. PC Magazine claims an audience of 5.1 million readers which is far larger than any of the A-list bloggers. Some popular blogs have more Google references than the A-list bloggers but a PC Magazine search still has more with over 5 million google references. Here are the results of some other searches for references on Google:
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