BlogOn: Influence moves to the edges

On Friday I appeared on the BlogOn panel “Metrics of Influence” with moderator David L. Sifry, CEO of Technorati; Shripriya Mahesh of eBay; Mark Finnern of SAP; and Chris DiBona of Damage Studios (who left Slashdot two years ago).

Here are some quick notes on some of what I said (and I’ll be writing a story on a related subject soon for the Online Journalism Review):

Influence is moving from big media to the edges. Users are becoming as influential as big media in certain areas, especially in specialized niches. What are the metrics of influence on the Internet? Start with usefulness and trustworthiness (call it reputation filters or circles of trust). Christopher Allen suggested a third: attention. But it needs to be underscored that you don’t need to be an A-list blogger to have influence on the Internet.

Here are some of the primary and secondary circles of trust I briefly mentioned:

1. News organizations are still a source of trusted, reliable reportage for tens of millions of Americans.

2. Blogs — either individual efforts, group blogs, or blogs affiliated with a blog network like WeblogsInc, Corante or Gawker Media — are becoming indispensible sources of trusted information for millions of people. Many are small blogs read by only a select group of people.

3. Trust mechanisms like Snopes, Hoaxbusters, Urbanlegends, rely on editors who vet rumors.

4. Reputation aggregators, including Google, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, and the other search engines all offer insight into what people are saying about someone — and what people are saying about the people who are making the comments.

5. Ecommerce sites that offer a community component — eBay, Amazon, BabyCenter — give added authority to posters who comment on products and services.

6. Independent islands of commentary like Epinions, BizRate, ThemeParkInsider, The Car Place, the Better Business Bureau Online, and other sites elevate users and amateur publishers to the status of consumer advocate.

7. Social networks. LinkedIn, Spoke, Tribe, MySpace, Orkut and other social networks offer varying degrees of influence based on the friend-of-a-friend paradigm.

Others?

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.