Revenge of the M-list
I chose this site's title and tagline, because I am fascinated by the social and technical forces causing change on the Internet. One aspect of that fascination is the role of the blogosphere's A-list. At first there was a single list covering all bloggers, but as the blogosphere has segmented along lines of interest, such as tech and politics, distinct A-lists have emerged. But the principle has stayed the same, within each niche there is a small clique that is read the most, and gets the most traffic and links.
It is easy to see how this clique's rank is maintained by reading Robert Scoble's blog (no general link is required, because you are already subscribed). I've never met Scoble, but I'm sure I'd like him in person. I don't think he'd let you not like him in person. He does, however, have an annoying habit of writing "That's great [A-lister]!" posts, a phenomenon known as getting scobled. For example, today he starts his post on the new Tech Memeorandum design with "Hey, Gabe, love the new design of Memeorandum!" For the technical quibblers, Gabe Rivera is not an official A-List blogger, since he rarely blogs, but his site gives him honorary status. (Oops, mustn't piss off Gabe. I love the redesign too, Gabe!)
Scobling is practiced by many A-listers, which is best demonstrated by the huge A-list threads that develop on Memeorandum whenever Mike Arrington has a party or releases a product. Since traffic and therefore rank is determined by the number of links, scobling is clearly self-reinforcing. This leads to accusations of A-listers being guilty of gatekeeping. Darwin explained this in terms of mating habits, where members of the same species have common behaviors, such as times of activity and feeding patterns that encourage intra-species sexual activity. Ironically, even hate sites reinforce the rank of A-listers.
This begs the question, how did A-listers get on the list in the first place? Darwin's response to the same question applied to origin of new species was that some new competitive pressure or geographic isolation must have emerged to cause the standard lines of association to break down. In the blogosphere this takes the form of a new technological advance in the tech world, or a new scandal in the political world. I've seen many blogosphere analysts use this argument to explain how an A-lister emerged after a burst of blogging surrounding a story of extreme interest.
I think there is also a more gradual phenomenon that I call the revenge of the M-list. When a new area of interest develops, such as what we are now seeing with OPML reading lists, a group of mutually linking bloggers emerges. If one of these bloggers is an A-lister, then the majority of the links point to his or her posts on the subject. If, on the other hand, the inter-linkers are all middle ranked bloggers, let's call them M-listers, they tend to link to each other fairly liberally. As new people become interested in the subject, they find these clusters of posts (memetracking sites do a great job of revealing M-list clusters), and also link to many of the blogs in the cluster, since there is no one recognizable A-lister to link to exclusively. In time the M-lister who is most prolific on this subject, but not necessarily the best writer or scobler, acquires even more links. Eventually this blogger becomes the authority on the subject, and even A-listers take note and deliver links. The resulting accumulation of links are enough to reach A-list status. Thus we have a slow bubbling up from the middle, rather than the overnight success story so often told by analysts.
There is a simple experiment to test this theory. First all the posts appearing on a memetracker can be extracted, and the bloggers separated by Technorati rank into A-list and M-list. Then the inter-links can be analyzed to see if M-listers do indeed form clusters of links with other M-listers. We already know that A-listers inter-link, but that can be tested for as well. Finally, these groups of M-list linkers can be followed over time to see if any individuals rise in rank to A-list status. A group of M-listers not in a cluster should also be followed as a control. I'm planning on working on Technorati rank analysis of Tech Memeorandum posts this week, so I'll see if I can contribute some scripts or XML data files that can assist in this experiment.
