When the “A-List” stops being “The A-List”

Feb 8, 2008 | blog

Bill Gates with the Bloggers (By jzawodn) So I was sitting at my local coffee shop this morning reading feeds, Twittering and writing. Not an unusual morning, but like other times a person gets inspired, it came from a comment from someone. This time from Jeremiah Owyang via Twitter. While talking about a the new Egos site created by Guy Kawasaki he Tweeted:

My recommendations to you: somewhere in the middle, develop your own feedreader of high value blogs and alerts everyone is unique

What occurred to me is that I didn’t think much about the a-list much any longer. While the semi-annual meme of beating on the a-list being a favorite sport for many bloggers, something any committed blogger will realize after awhile is that they develop their own a-list. This is simply the list of bloggers that they read and are influenced by.

It becomes less about the celebrity status of the blogger and more about the value of their content. I think it was Chris Brogan who started calling his personal list of favorites “Rockstars“, and it’s an apt title for a list of people who continually influence you on a daily basis. Hey I know good ‘ol Diamond Dave did that back in the ’80s for a heck of a lot of people. 😉

I’m sure a number of people are sitting back saying that I’ve missed the point of “The A-List”. They’d point out that this group of high-profile bloggers control the topics on Techmeme, Tailrank, et al. I don’t see that – I see a *lot* of great bloggers moving that conversation all over the place. At any rate, that’s not the point of this post. I’m really just talking about building your own list of blogs and bloggers that influence you.

Here are some opinions I’ve developed (though some are obvious 😉 )

  • There is no one definition of the A-List – everyone’s a list is different
  • “The A-List” everyone talks about are just bloggers – albeit with industry insight
  • The more time you spend reading in the blogosphere, the more important the content and less the celebrity status of the blogger
  • Your A-List will include high-profile bloggers, because of the value they bring to you, just like the lower-profile bloggers you read

I guess I just want to people to keep exploring and finding that content that has value to you. Don’t worry about if they are part of “The A-List”, there really are some great bloggers among them and many of their observations are relevant to the conversation that we’re looking for.

So, the A-List stops being “The A-List” when the reader realizes that each blogger brings value to the conversation and you start looking beyond who they are and more at what they say. What’s your take on this?

Photo credit: jzawodin

Fast Feeds – Getting more from shared feeds

Jan 20, 2008 | blog

feeds Ok, that title is a pretty poor attempt of comparing shared RSS Feeds to fast food, but it does bare some truth if we follow through a little bit.  Starting with Google Reader’s Share feature, people were able to share content of their choosing with anyone who wanted to visit their Shared Items site.  Here’s mine if your curious what the resulting pre-fabricated link blog looks like.

The really interesting twist to this Google Reader feature, is the RSS feed that goes with it.  A custom feed made up of select posts from possibly dozens or hundreds of sources, aggregated by your favorite person or blogger.  This opened up a huge potential for pre-selected, filtered, quality feeds that mirror the genre of the blogger of your choice.

Now there are a couple of shared feed aggregators, kind of like Techmeme, that allow you to add your shared feed to the list.  My favorite at the moment is ReadBurner, which recently added a stats page.  Another tool is SharedReader, which, unfortunately, looks to be down as of this writing.  Tools like these rank posts from individual shared feeds by popularity.  Now I can compare what is on Techmeme, or Tailrank, or Newsvine with what is being shared by everyday people via Google Reader and choose what’s important to me.  It also allows me to see who is sharing these posts, and be able to gauge how relevant they are to my interests.

I guess the point I’m trying to get around to is the availability of pre-filtered feeds, that a busy person can simply read instead of hunting for.  We don’t have to sort through the duplicate posts from 15 news sources, or non-relevant posts that distract us from the task at hand.  You can find shared feeds from people you trust, and know that they’ve done the sorting for you, so you can save time.

Along with this, however, is the fact that someone else is suggesting your reading list.  Just like fast food, it’s not always 100% of what you want (heck does it even come close to 75% of what you want?) but it fills the void.  Fast food saves time, but doesn’t necessarily taste that great – or is it that good for you.  The same can be said of shared feeds.  Don’t get me wrong, I follow several too.

While I think shared feeds are a great way of saving time, using some aggregation tools that rank these shared feeds into more relevant lists help you find the content that you may be looking for.  Some bloggers are even being very diligent to share only the most interesting, relevant posts that aren’t likely to be found in the “mass media” of technology, political, or social meme aggregators.

Still, there is nothing like keeping track of your favorite bloggers and sorting through your own feed list.  It takes more time, but it’s a better way to connect with your favorite writers, and take more in context from each blog.  At least that’s the way I look at it. 🙂

Tips?  Suggestions?  Other meme aggregators?  Suggested feeds?  Think I’m off base on this?  Share ’em all below in the comments.

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