I agree Jim. I blog to learn and to communicate to and within a community. Diversity is my aim, not some list that someone else thinks is important.

The title is a bit hostile, but I totally dig it! :)

I'm far more focused on "share" than size. How much does your blog share with your audience, add to the conversation, further the medium and promote ethical standards?

These are the attributes that make for a true and valued A+ List.

Thanks for this post.

Now of course you know that the A-listers will just claim that we're a bunch of jealous whiners. (Maybe I am, maybe I'm not...)

The tide is slowly beginning to turn in favor of those of us who try to act responsibly and give and take and share. Conversation and content are beginning to mean more and more.

Besides, which A-list do you want to be on? I mean, in the world of bicycle manufacturers, I'm an A-list blogger (I'm also one of only about a dozen people who blog... but that doesn't matter).

I find that there are certain A-List bloggers I read and enjoy. But while they’re really knowledgeable, I don’t find them any more so than the "B-Listers"(Marketing Profs, Mary Schmidt, et al.). What is different, of course, is that more people pay attention to them. And that’s just life.

But I also think that the B-List comments and conversations are more “real” in that there is no ulterior motive, no looking to curry attention or have someone “famous” think you’re pithy or smart. (OK: so I do want you to think I’m pithy and smart, but you know what I mean.) The B-List strikes me as more about exchanging ideas, supporting each other, learning, teaching…

There’s something interesting I noted on one A-List blog. I really enjoy Tom Peters. This week there are two posts that seem to tell me something about hanging on the A-List vs. chillin’ with the homies on the B-List. On Sunday, Cathy Mosca (who, I take it, works with Tom) had a post on Maxine Clark, the founder of Build-a-Bear. To me, this post had lots of potential to inspire commentary and conversation. Look at the angles: woman entrepreneur; customer-centered business philosophy; lets kids be kids… Last count: 2 comments.

A couple of days later, there was a brief post by Tom about his ordering flowers as Thanksgiving gifts for his friends. There didn’t seem to me to be all that much to talk about, but the Send-a-Flower post has, at last count, produced 9 comments. (OK - a couple were thank you notes, but still...)

Telling, huh?

But what would a B-Lister (or am I a C-Lister?) know about such things?

The Daily Fix is B-list, but MarketingProfs itself, according to the site, is A-list: "...with 1245 links in the last 180 days, Technorati places marketingprofs.com in the very high authority group. That makes you a A-List Blogger!"

Oy! Whatever! Let's take a real measurement, as defined so succinctly by CK: "How much does your blog share with your audience, add to the conversation, further the medium and promote ethical standards?"

And truly...how much FUN are you having?

And Maureen -- great point. I totally dig a good blog written by an industry doer who doesn't have a huge audience and therefore has no affectation. Right there is the beauty of the low barrier to entry in Internet publishing, in my mind.

Thanks for the post, Jim. I agree. The fact that MarketingProfs is A list is a good example of what you said because MarketingProfs is not technically a blog...hmm, what does that say about the validity of their classification system?

Ann is right...it's about how much FUN we're having, too. Good point.

Thanks for making the share so much fun :-). And Maureen, too cute that you said "chillin' with the B-List homies". Ha!

You have a point, I'm not a fan of the "list" idea. However the number of blogs linking to you does matter if only for SEO purposes, so it is important to be mindful of how those numbers grow. A more useful way of measuring blog success is the number of RSS feed subscribers you have or how many XML pulls your site has each day. Quantify your success by the number of people that actually care about what you have to say and make sure that number is always growing! Great post.

I think the whole "list" thing is what happens when non-creative eggheads try to quantify the situation. Some people aren't abstract thinkers, therefore everything must be quantified and listed. (I have a buddy who is like this, in that he lists and ranks his best friends. It's annoying and occasionally insulting, but that's how he rolls. He's also semi-autistic.) So, in a nutshell, I think the A-list is a product of people who don't really understand blogging at its core with the "Three C's" (creativity, community, and conversation.)

Interesting post. I have taken a different approach- using custom attributes on cfcomponent,function,argument and property tags to accomplish similar annotation ends.

A blog which doesn’t allow comments is still a blog. When I started blogging over six years ago, there were many many blogs already. Yes, I know it seems to many as if in the year 2000 you had to hunt around to find a blog. You didn’t. They were “everywhere”. Most have just closed down since then.

Beyond criticism, we experience that blogs are the simplest way to express ones feeling about the topic being discussed. You just have to put your fingers on keys and write the first thing that comes to your mind and you can see it up, visible to hundreds of thousands of people, the very next moment.