A & B List Bloggers?
In the Information article, I was quoted for saying there is an A list and B list of bloggers. Argh! I never meant it that way (sadly, it has been taken quite literally by some of the Danish Bloggers) - I was mainly referring to the A-List blogger discussion circulating in the blogworld some 1-2? years ago. If at all, there might still be an A-list of bloggers (still mainly US-based, I guess) but there never was such a thing as a B-list (except as a rhetoric move).

The A-list bloggers were/are people who have several thousands hits a day (I surmise) and have been influencing the blog discussions heavily such as Evhead (founder of Blogger) and Dave Winer (one of the first bloggers) - see end of post for a suggestion of current (US?) A-list bloggers.

Personally, I think the distinction between A-list bloggers and all the other lists of bloggers becomes more and more difficult to maintain, as more and more people blog, and more and more blogclusters arise with their own local "celebrities" - there are hardly any blog celebrities left whom ALL bloggers know. And even so, an US A-list may have no pertinence in the Danish community of bloggers. However, if you view blogs as informal and loose social and professional networks, just as in every other community, you have people who are in this community more influential or whose voice are more often heard (i.e. more often linked) - and I do think we would be kidding ourselves if we don't own up to that. This doesn't mean that all those not linked or read as often are "worse" bloggers; it is just as much a question of coincidence and zeitgeist - or maybe even blog-post frequency, who gets to be an "muchlinked" or much quoted person for a period (though writing skills _do_ count in the end, too ;))

Here is some links to bring you into the original A-List discussion:
- See the section A-List in this article Deconstructing "You've Got Blog" - the latter is probably the article that probably started the entire A-list discussion (??)
A-List Bloggers Parody (indirectly tells you who is thought of as A-list bloggers - written in relation to the above articles)
A recent attempt of an A-list, found in a blog comment (I for sure don't know all of them, and they are naturally all English writers...)

P.S. I talked to Lars of Armarium yesterday (he's a student in my course, small world) - he has been listing Danish blogs for a few years now, and estimates something like 300-400 Denmark-based blogs are now online; and more and more are now being written in Danish which I think is a very positive development.


# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:14