THE ALPHA BLOGGERS

What we have here is a new and unmediated link in the information food chain. Let's consider the tech bloggers who make up the A-list. (The political bloggers who got so much attention during the campaign have an A-list of their own.) No one hired them. No one appointed them. All you need to start your own Weblog is the software--which is low-cost, or free, and very easy to use--and something to say. Out of the inchoate chatter of the Web, the sharpest voices simply emerge. Certainly there are those--like Dave Winer, an early proponent who just completed a yearlong stint organizing a blog community at Harvard--whose reputation preceded them into the blogosphere. But more common are the people like Linux Journal editor Doc Searles, a long-respected tech observer whose well-read blog has made him a virtual brand, or Dan Gillmor, whose "We the Media" book is the blogging manifesto.

Other people, by a combination of writing skills, unyielding curiosity, canny instinct and lots of sweat equity, rise up from total obscurity to join the big dogs in the community. This happens when an A-lister notices a newbie's work and links to it. In those cases fame can come fast. Just ask Robert Scoble, an unknown when his items were first picked up by the alphas. "Within two weeks I was invited to Steve Wozniak's Super Bowl party," he says.

"There indeed is an A-list, as well as important niche influencers on smaller topics," says Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, a company that tracks the blogosphere. Technorati watches more than 4 million blogs. Most are isolated, and there are about 100,000 that have 20 or more "inbound" links (that means that a blogger has identified an item on someone else's Weblog and set up a one-click pathway for a reader to move directly to that item on the other author's site). But about 10,000 people have more than 100 inbounds.

Now we're getting into the realm of the alphas. Sifry keeps a running list of them, a geek hit parade of power brokers who zing arrows and shape opinions while quaffing lattes and using the Starbucks Wi-Fi. In the tech conferences you can often spot them in person, clustering toward the wall so they can keep their laptops plugged in. No matter where they are, they maintain a running conversation with their unseen audience, which can be as big as 20,000 visitors on a good day. And though no one pays for access to their homegrown publications, they can shape opinions, as the podcast example shows.

"The blogosphere is a tipping-point machine," says Searles, referring to Malcolm Gladwell's treatise on how ideas and trends can suddenly tilt from obscurity to ubiquity. A good idea gets amplified by the "echo chamber" of the blogosphere. It need not be the original thought of the blogger. In fact, as scientists from the HP Information Dynamics Lab wrote in a paper entitled "Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace," ideas move on the blogosphere like viruses; the alpha bloggers spread concepts like Typhoid Marys. "They're movers, salesmen and connectors," says Searles.

They're also hard workers. In order to crack into the upper strata, you have to post frequently to stay on the fickle radar of this ADD-infested crowd. It certainly helps to be an excellent writer, like Halley Suitt, one of the few female alphas in the tech blogosphere. You have to link prodigiously to other blogs, increasing your profile and increasing the chances for inbound links. And you have to actually form strong opinions about what you're writing about--passion is required in a good blog. All of this takes time: Scoble spends two hours daily writing his Weblog and three more hours reading hundreds of other blogs in search of fresh ideas and nifty software innovations. "I want to be the first guy to spot the smart new guy or a cool new Windows app," he says. Even then you have no guarantee of blog fame. "What makes one person gain traction and another not?" asks Winer. "The same thing that makes one person a rock star and another a taxi driver."