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TOP 25 PEOPLE ONLINE: PEOPLE’S CHOICE

Forbes magazine loves doing lists, like so many other business and technology magazines, and that old hack called Time magazine. The latest from this list factory is a list of Web’s top 25 Celebs, populated by the likes of Calacanis, Perez Hilton, Matt Drudge among others.

On the important criteria of being useful, there are only a few deserving names: Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky (Forbes list him under a yet more pretentious ‘near miss’ category) Seth Godin, Om Malik, Cory Doctorow come to mind.

- Is Amanda Congdon still as popular as before?

What criteria did Forbes have?
- Is it all a wild imagination of some solitary journalists?
- Did they conduct Google search and scoured Digg, del.icio.us, Techmeme, Technorati, Blogpulse and others for mention?
- What about number of RSS subscribers?

Presenting the People’s choice Web 25 list

My main criteria: People, who educate, inform and are a good at the same time. The Internet might look like a ‘24 * 7 global chat room cum chat show’, people still come to net looking for something.

It would be silly to limit the number to limit top web people to a number. Here’s a list comprising of people and groups of people:

1. People who hit Techmeme, Digg and Del.icio.us front pages on a regular basis.

2. People who are helping others blog better: Darren Rouse, for example. Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration blog is one of India’s most useful bloggers.

3. People who know search: Danny Sullivan, the guys at SEOMOZ, Aaron Wall, Shoemoney, John Chow, and many others.

4. Successful internet businesspeople: The person behind Plentyoffish, Kevin Rose, Gabe Rivera

5. Veteran Bloggers: Jason Kottke, Rebeccablood

6. Blog Network Owners: Nick Denton of Gawker network, because of a distinct editorial approach to news coverage.

7. Great bloggers: Peter Rojas of Engadget, one of the most successful technology blog, Gina Trapani of ever-useful Lifehacker.

8. Media analysts: Apart from Jeff Jarvis, there are Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, Rob Curley, Amy Gahran, Rafat Ali of Paidcontent, and many others.

9. Web 2.0 coverage: Okay, Web 2.0 may be tired but you find beter analysis at Readwriteweb, Dion Hinchclif’s Web 2.0 blog and at Pete Cashmore of Mashable. I will say it again: The comments section of Techcrunch is better than the main writeup part. Bokardo has useful web 2.0 analysis and philosophy coverage.


10. The Snarkists: People who ask tough questions about the technology business issues – guys like Nick Douglas at Valleywag and Nicholas Carr (Roughtype blog)

11. Blogs for entrepreneurs: Guy Kawasaki’s blog, Positive Sharing blog.

12. Web development and design resources: 37 signals and A List apart are great reads.


There are many more. I apologize for any misses, especially since I understand that for many the web is a university as well.

Make a Digg for people
Put up all these names online up for vote and rating across criterion of usefulness, influence and popularity.

Don’t leave it to print media listmasters.

Forbes 25 list story has had weird journey online so far: Forbes print the story, Steve Rubel, A PR guy who also blogs gets mentioned in the ‘Near Miss’ category, and happily writes in his blog. That in turn gets picked up by Techmeme’s robot and thus it starts a new journey of its own.

Freeing ourselves of Mass media validation
I still don’t get why we depend on print media for validation. If someone at Economist or New York Times does it, it is okay for they don’t go for cheap tricks like lists. You may pardon when online hacks such as this writer use lists, aiming to go for glory despite being short on time, knowledge and creativity. 

We expect better things from our rather better-paid mainstream journalists.

It is strange that print continues to cheer Second Life, while there is a wealth of criticism of the whole system available online. I am sure no print publication will call Second Life a Ponzi scheme because they don’t understand how it all works., relying on their chosen ‘experts’ instead.

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:36 PM