"The Alpha Bloggers"

Ad Innovator : アルファブロガーの台頭 で知った、Newsweek Tech Writer の Steven Levi の記事、"The Alpha Bloggers"。(MSNBC 経由）

"alpha bloggers" have built large and influential audiences.　The bloggers who follow technology consist of a particularly evolved community. The alphas, or "A-listers," as they call themselves, commonly cross-link to one another, with the effect of having one of their comments amplified and commented on. In the case of podcasting, the accumulated buzz from the blogs became deafening. The subject suddenly became the hot topic in geekdom, and soon appeared in The New York Times and BusinessWeek.

The lesson is that there's a new force—spearheaded by people who work for no bosses and whose prose never sees an editor's pencil—that provides the water-cooler fodder for the larger high-tech community. Its power extends not only to high-tech cool-hunting but also to what's politically correct, geek style. (Open source... gooood. Onerous copy protection... eeeevil.) And the significance of this phenomenon has some important implications for the way opinions will be formed in the decentralized world of Internet media.