Blogs
Twitter
Jaiku
Pownce
Facebook
MySpace
bebo
Second Life
MoodMill
Hictu
Xanga
… ad nauseam
Even if you only spent an hour a day on each of those your day is toast and people like Robert Scoble wonder why their friends are reporting that their readership numbers are down.
Here’s a clue .. it’s SUMMERTIME … you know .. that real life thing that includes boating, fishing, baseball games, the occasional BBQ and gawd forbid family time without some damn iPhone or some such thing glued to your fingers. Not everything in this world revolves around the fact that you can twitter or pownce or post the fact that you just read some blog post or you posted some silly-assed photo to MySpace that will come back to haunt you.
Then to boot, folks like Hugh Macleod go off on a tangent and point to this proliferation of social media as to death of the A-List and how it’s about time. Well sorry to tell you Hugh but you are missing out on one major human trait — we like lists. Whether it be Top 10 this or Top 100 that we as a species love to rate things - even Twitter has a Top 100 list.
If you think that something like the Technorati Top 100 (A-List) is going to go away I think you are in for a surprise. Even if the hope of people like Joe Duck that the list gets repopulated by blogs of value; rather than the those commercialized versions of blogs, comes to pass, the fact is that as long as people strive to get to the top of their field there will always be a ranking systems.
The fact that many of the so-called A-Listers of the blogging world are now also the so called leaders in many of the [gag] social networks [/gag] is only because they are primarily where the developers of these cool networks go to to get traction. You think Pownce would come to me or even Joe Duck to try and get started - not likely.
The A-List isn’t just a Technorati invention. The A-List has existed for as long as we have had a need to give ourselves a target to shoot for and no amount of denying it exists is going to make it so. As Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests puts it:
A-lists will always exist because there will always be people who are Popular.
And to deny that it will change because there is a new way for people to share and give attention is pure, unvarnished, horseshit.
Conversation Tags: A-List, social networks, Twitter, Pownce, Robert Scoble, Hugh Macleod, Joe Duck, Tony Hung
6 Comments
Points well taken. And we should remember that the A list will develop on twitter as well, with some twitterers having thousands of followers.
Why? Especially in the summer one of the pluses twitter brings to the table is that getting tweets on your phone is quick & easy where reading blog posts might not be so simple.
And I can tweet while waiting for pizza when I’m not doing much else anyhow. Why twitter? Better question: why not?
I’ve often thought people must be independently wealthy to find the time to be active in all these social networks.
Or maybe I just need better ‘time management’… but I don’t even have time for that!
Susan R:
I have a hard time equating family time in the outdoors with sitting on a park bench tapping at cell phone keys
John -
Not to mention that the list is only the tip of the iceberg .. as it was I forgot LinkedIn
Information overload is coming up on us quickly and it’s results aren’t going to be pretty
Also don’t forget kijiji which is basically the website my cat goes to when he steps on the keyboard.
Webomatics:
I was just writing about that when you posted LOL
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