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Huffington Post number one? Shows how much I know... I never go there at all. Odd that they don't include community blogs like Digg, for example, which by sheer numbers alone can shift swathes of online attention. And I haven't heard of a lot of those included on the list, but I'm not so much a blog fanatic.
Metafilter seems important to us, and to old-school bloggers as a formative place, etc., but not so much to the masses. This is why people like Jenny Diski, et al, are always "discovering" it and seeming surprised, and people say things like it "flies under the radar", and we say "huh?".
Eh, lazy list. It's not 50 powerful blogs so much as 50 popular blogs. Not the same thing. I wouldn't describe some of those blogs as "powerful"- icanhascheezburger, Dooce, Go Fug Yourself for starters, they're not powerful, they're just popular.
mefi qualifies due to the fact that 8 million other blogs plus dozens of 'real' journalists get a good chunk of their material from teh mefi (often without giving us credit).
icanhazcheezburger definitely qualifies, imo. Judging from my own friends and family, it's one of the few blogs that reaches people who don't read blogs.
icanhazcheezburger definitely qualifies, imo. Judging from my own friends and family, it's one of the few blogs that reaches people who don't read blogs.
Where, say, perezhilton is read by people who don't read blogs, and it caused Mr. Whatsisface to get profiled in national magazines, to appear on that awful celebrity rapper show, etc. Those things are examples of power and influence at work, right? I'll admit it--this whole thing kinda confuses me.
icanhazcheezburger definitely qualifies, imo. Judging from my own friends and family, it's one of the few blogs that reaches people who don't read blogs.
When I talk to my offline friends, they never ever know what Metafilter is. And you know, that serves me about right. I like having MeFi and MeCha as my own little corners of the web, providing me with info and ideas to chat about. It's like I have a secret weapon.
But the thing is, everyone under the age of, say, 35, knows from Go Fug Yourself and icanhazcheezburger. And my least web literate friends delight in attempting to introduce me to these sites.
What were we talking about again? Oh yeah. Massive popularity contest with no apparent criteria.
Where, say, perezhilton is read by people who don't read blogs, and it caused Mr. Whatsisface to get profiled in national magazines, to appear on that awful celebrity rapper show, etc. Those things are examples of power and influence at work, right?
Exactly. PerezHilton strikes me as an example of a blog that is powerful- the music acts he pushes get a lot from his endorsment (so much that he's about to start a collaboration with a major record label). That's power. A lot of readers isn't power, but if you can make those readers do or buy stuff (I'm surprised Consumerist didn't make the list), or you're making national news (like Jezebel, with the unairbrushed magazine cover) that the traditional major news outlets are covering, THAT'S power.
Yeah, that's where I'm at--any definition of 'power' that doesn't emphasize the ability to affect people's actions in the offline world is, for me at least, a little dubious.
It's interesting that we're trying to argue that powerful websites "influence people's actions in the offline world", while websites that "influence people's actions in the online world" are presumably not powerful?... I'm too sleepy to explore that concept...
I'm trying to think of a useful way to compare and contrast the Wonkette/HuffPo/Consumerist offline variety of power to the 4chan/ytmnd/Icanhazcheeseburger online kind. But all I can think of are stereotypes, oversimplifications, generalities--you know how it is.
I'm a bit surprised about Beppe Grillo, as the English version makes me cringe in translation horror. (Psychodwarf is Berlusconi, though, not Mastella.)
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