MediaVidea

The 100 most powerful people on the Internet in 2007

The most powerful people on the internet are the top users of social media sites. Traditionally, the top people on the web can be as banal as the latest from Forbes (example), the big daddy of list making sites.

Seeing that useless list, my first reaction was to come up with a fresh version of the People’s Choice List I came up with back in January but I think the earlier list is still relevant and then I recalled that getting on top of sites such as Digg or becoming a top digg/reddit/stumbleupon user was covered more by bloggers than many other topics.

If Time magazine so arrogantly anointed 2006 as the Year of ‘You’, it would not be outlandish for you to announce 2007 as the year of social news site users.

For a moment, I propose we do not get into debates over whether having as many friends on Digg is the future of online news, where Gtalk is all you need to put a story on Digg’s front page.

Let us instead celebrate all those high school students, the enterprising housewive, the ‘soon-out-of-college-must-make-some-name-using- cheap- broadband- and- ample- free-time’ guy with a plan, the hacker who has no job, the wannabe Arrington, the SEO upstart, the SMM huckster, part-time workers of the world, the whacked-out-of-his-mind hack at that big corporation, the store owner (where few shop anyway), the overeager Samaritan happy to help out the new UGC site's owner who promised him top billing (or a job in the future), the college student (mostly film and arts majors), and the comment whores who take over entire commenting below a post of their fancy.

Obviously, FREE TIME is all that you need to join this most illustrious band of people who have collectively managed to invoke awe, fear and loathing of internet publishers everywhere, forcing them to modify their content to suit their predominantly libertarian, righteous, male, pro-Ron Paul, voyeur tastes.

These guys have set the trend for names that people will surely have by the time Battlestar Galactica becomes a reality:
CliffofOsaka, Supernova17 (a great age indeed for doing great things, huh?), Koregaonpark (19 year old kid), Stoners, dirtyfratboy…

If you get your high from this ‘I vote you up, you vote me up’ frenzy, I suppose you will be panting with anticipation about who these most powerful users, the crème-de-la-crème are.

Choose from the people in the lists below and make up your own 100

The Top 1000 Digg Users

Top Users of StumbleUpon
(site created by a Top Digg User Muhammad Saleem who is a good writer as well. Another notable top social news participant is David Cohn.

Top 50 Niche Social Media sites and their Top Users

P.S.
Reddit.com is a worthy site but I couldn’t find a list of top users, which anyway can be useless because there are no proper profile pages and I suspect that top journalists from Wired Magazine (which owns Reddit) may be top users of Reddit as well, considering the high-falutin news coverage on the site.

Users of Slahdot.org have not been taken into consideration – too refined for my taste.

Related Reading
Social Media Websites in Illustrated Form
Nice cartoons to illustrate the differences b/w the different social news sites

Wizards of Buzz (great WSJ article from February)

Some Shameless Self promotion: Posts I wrote about the topic this year
Getting on top of Digg is out, becoming a top Digg user is in
A Short analysis of content on top social news sites
Top 25 People Online, People's Choice

Labels: Digg, reddit, social news, top 10, trends

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:30 PM