Blogs we read
2 October 2006, 6:40 AM (Last edited: 2 October 2006, 6:40 AM)
There's 55 million blogs out there, so why pick these?
Five criteria for A-list ranking:
1. These bloggers aren’t (just) using the medium for personal diarising or self-expression. They are an altogether different breed - (OCD?) news junkies with an obsession for finding out about and talking about everything that's happening in the overlap between media, business, life and technology right now.
2. Their main source of ideas is each other, so there’s a social dimension to what they do that’s at the very heart of their work
3. Another social dimension is that they are connected to other online communities (or their blog comments are so busy or influential that they constitute a defacto online community)
4. It’s not just virtual social worlds that these guys inhabit – they are also intimately connected to real-world communities. This isn’t an accident. There’s no 'dualism' here, because it’s mostly the real-world that their headline-grabbing scoops and leaks come from
5. They get each other's respect and earn their position in the A list by offering a unique perspective, finding stuff (before anyone else finds it) that other A listers will find worth checking out, spotting an interesting and important new angle that nobody else has written about yet
Blog Maverick
Yes, we all knew online video was going to be big, but Marc Cuban made himself into a billionaire by putting his money where our mouths were
BuzzMachine
Jeff Jarvis, whose spat with Dell made him into the god of consumer blogging
Chris, founder of Gnomedex, the main annual Blogging A list get-together, is about to bring back 'Tech TV' and try to beat Scoble to the punch as tomorrow's top video metablogger
Is this guy Microsoft's number one (official) blogger, now that Scoble has gone?
GigaOM
Om Malik is striving to be the first Metablogging mogul (his er, 'competitors' wouldn't necessarily think they had anything to do with monetising metablogging)
Google Blogoscoped
Blogger Philip Lenssen of Germany says his site is 80% Google and it is undoubtedly one of the most high profile blogs about Google, but does it pass the online news test? Do you go here first for news about Google? Techmeme seems to think you do
Joel on Software
Joel Spolsky is one of the most respected bloggers on the technology scene, often writing about a lot more than just software
John Battelle's Searchblog
One of the Blog Moguls, he runs something called 'Federated Media' , a 'Blog Stable' which includes many of the other names on this list among its cohort. He appears at many real world blogging events and writes very influentially about the blogosphere
Joho the Blog
David Weinberger, Cluetrainer and senior Blogosphere grandee, straddles the technology and politics divide
Jon's Radio
John Udell, a blogger at the highly respected Infoworld magazine was an early devotee of 'peer to peer' (p2p) technology (he wrote a book on it) but unlike Ray Ozzie, did not manage to use his p2p prescience to secure Bill Gates's old job at Microsoft
Marc's Voice
A co-founder of what became Macromedia, Marc Canter is a speaker at most of the main blog events. Too many people know, like and respect him for his blog to be ignored by the rest of the A list.
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
How does it feel to be on the inside of Google? This guy is trusted by the rest of the A list to give a realistic Google insider perspective.
Micro Persuasion
The PR guru of metablogging
O'Reilly Radar
Tim O'Reilly is yet another seminal figure in the Blogosphere. If you didn't already notice that the Open Source Movement and the blogosphere are considered by many to share their origins and their early aspirations, Tim will remind you at every opportunity. Not just one of the most important technology book publishers, he heads up the highly influential O'Reilly Network (of Bloggers?).
paidContent.org
These people are in the business of 'monetizing digital media'. What makes them more interesting to us, is that they are also interested in bringing just about every single new development in that field to your attention. This means that their 'media investment news stream' is more comprehensive than almost anywhere else's.
plasticbag.org
BBC (loyal?) critic or 'sleeper' infiltrator at Yahoo?
Publishing 2.0
This is the blog of Scott Karp, a high profile contributor to the social media debate, as you can see from this link showing him as a top story on Techmeme. He also took on MySpace and won
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog
Nick Carr in many ways epitomises the 'equal and opposite reaction' that constitutes the "technosceptic blogger". Hardly a confirmed luddite (as a blogger, this would perhaps be difficult) he is in many senses the antithesis of Scoble and Arrington: he is more pessimistic, satyrical, critical about the new stuff than the old pre-web, or at least (cynical?) about Web 2.0 . His stance is favoured by such venerated British online publications as The Register.
Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger
Yesterday he made a brave (and perhaps at least partially successful) effort at 'humanising' Microsoft, tomorrow he will be doing something even more scary (with video)
He invented permission marketing, which is why spam doesn't exist any more
Steve Gillmor's GestureLab
We are the only people who understand what he's saying, and we're very afraid
Tech Crunch
Mike Arrington pretends he's all about VCs and Web 2.0 but he's really much more bubbly than that
Techdirt
In the debate between those who think blogging and journalism are either the same or different, here is a blogger who writes like a journalist, has a blog that looks a lot like a newspaper (but not like a newspaper's blog section) but not as much like a newspaper as The Huffington Post, a 'blog' which has loads of journalists. He often writes about the same kind of stuff that Scoble does, and similarly has a big audience, but the sites have a completely different look and feel. Still confused about the difference between bloggers and journalists? You should be. It's mostly arbitrary.
The Jason Calacanis Weblog
How can someone with as much brilliance and energy have got themselves such a lowly job?
Oops, that's out of date, he's left it.
Valleywag
The Tech Blogosphere Sillicon Valley Gossip Blog. If they won't talk about you, you aren't on the A list
Workbench
Rogers Cadenhead was once Dave Winer's software developer and he's woven into the fabric of the history of the blogosphere (he's also a respected metablogger)
Doc Searls
He seems to me to be the most prominent of the Cluetrain authors in the Blogosphere. It may be something to do with the fact that I've heard his voice and thoughtful and well informed metablogosphere-centric comments on some of my favourite (seminal?) episodes of the Gillmor Gang.
This guy is now the leading UK journalist-turned blogger (what do you mean, what's the difference?) in The Valley. We'll judge the results by which stories he manages to get to first (that's not a journalistic criterion, is it?)
http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3226
http://www.danablankenhorn.com/
http://www.interarbor-solutions.com/
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/about/
http://www.rageboy.com/
Chris Locke, another cluetrainer, highly influential
http://photomatt.net/
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/
http://sambrook.typepad.com/sacredfacts/
Dave Sifry
Chris anderson
my god, could you have any more white men represented??
Posted by: MW | 06 May 2008 at 03:57 PM