No, this has nothing to do with Eliot Spitzer and “Kristen”, it’s about that other kind of whore: bloggers.
The other day, Mark at Going Like Sixty clued me in to this list of “The 50 Most Powerful Blogs” that appeared in the Manchester Observer (the Sunday companion paper to The Guardian) last weekend. Unsurprisingly, it also turned up yesterday for the requisite dose of snark and derision at MetaFilter.
Mark said that he only reads one of those fifty on a regular basis; I count six of them on my daily blogcrawl (and, yes, one of them IS “I Can Has Cheezburger”, thank you for asking) and another one that is a frequent-but-not-daily stop (Huffington Post). But I have close to 150 feeds in my RSS reader, so it’s fair to say that my net casts out far and wide beyond the biggest fish.
The MetaFilter crowd was a bit huffy about not making that list, even though lists like these should in now way be confused with reality, but I don’t know if this is a list anyone wants to be on. Are we really supposed to believe that “I Can Has Cheezburger” is 1) powerful and b) more powerful than “The Drudge Report”, which almost brought down Bill Clinton’s presidency? And if online gossip websites like PerezHilton and TMZ are “powerful”, then maybe I’ve been underestimating just how doomed civilization really is. It doesn’t help that the article doesn’t tell you what it means by powerful; do they mean these sites have the most visitors, that they generate the most revenue for their advertisers, or that they sway public discourse in some important way? Again, if that third one is true, it means that silly cat pictures with bad spelling and grammar have become the Bible and the Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century. Let that sink in for a moment.
People have been ranking and rating blogs in a myriad of ways for almost as long as we old-timers have been blogging. So this particular article is decidedly old hash warmed through and shouldn’t affect anyone’s reading anymore than the Bloggie Awards or the circle-jerk they call SXSW. On Boing Boing (#2 on this list), Cory Doctorow, the Busiest Man On The Internet, was egotistical kind enough to link to his own article at Information Week wherein he pontificates on how you, too, can be as elite, famous, and good-looking as he is. (Hint to all those SEO bloggers out there, it has NOTHING to do with you)
My RSS is bigger than your RSS.
Does this blog make my RSS look big?
LOL! Objects in blog may be larger than they appear.
If you need me, I’ll be holed up in my dark, dank, uber-obscure corner of da Interweb.
Ah, (&^% it…I’m at least as good-looking as Cory Doctorow, even if I’m nowhere as elite and famous…right??
I dunno…do you have the requisite hipster black horn-rimmed glasses and slightly off-center crew cut?