THE ALPHA BLOGGERS

A few months ago no one had heard of "podcasting" because it didn't exist. Last summer an MTV veejay turned technophile named Adam Curry wanted to do an Internet-based radio show, distributing it through his Weblog. (A Weblog, or blog, is a personal Web site where somebody self-publishes an electronic journal, often linking to other things on the Web that strike the author's fancy.) With the help of fellow bloggers, he created spe-cial software that allowed digital audio content to be distributed directly to an iPod digital music player. You could even "subscribe" to these audio feeds, automatically loading up your little gizmo with these "podcasts."

It's the kind of neat little innovation that in past times might have stayed under the radar for quite a while before others caught on.

But in these times, no cool idea goes unnoticed. Something as interesting as podcasting was bound to be embraced by the blogosphere, the interconnected tapestry of hundreds of thousands of Weblogs. But in specific slices of the sphere, opinion can be shaped by a much smaller number. By dint of reputation, novelty and charm, certain "alpha bloggers" have built large and influential audiences.

The bloggers who follow technology consist of a particularly evolved community, since some of them are pioneers of the technology of Weblogs themselves. The alphas, or "A-listers," as they call themselves, commonly cross-link to one another, with the effect of having one of their comments amplified and commented on. In the case of podcasting, they conducted a deep asynchronous conversation about the practice. Was this a new form of personal, do-it-yourself radio? Could it replace radio? Even though its workings were fairly esoteric--no one is close to making podcasting as simple a process as Apple has made music downloading--the accumulated buzz from the blogs became deafening.

The inevitable result was that podcasting suddenly became the hot topic in geekdom. In early October bloggers began keeping track of how many Google results you would get if you queried the word "podcasting." Day by day it rose... 5,950... 7,510... 13,000. By the end of the month it was more than 50,000, and by mid-November the number was 387,000. By that time the din of the blogosphere was too loud for traditional writers to ignore, and articles about podcasting appeared in the L.A. Times, The New York Times and BusinessWeek.

The lesson is that there's a new force--spearheaded by a relatively few people who work for no bosses and whose prose never sees an editor's pencil--that provides the water-cooler fodder for the larger high-tech community. Its power extends not only to high-tech cool-hunting but also to what's politically correct, geek-style. (Open source... gooood. Onerous copy protection... eeeevil.) And the significance of this phenomenon has some important implications for the way opinions will be formed in the decentralized world of Internet media.