Influence

Bloggers don't have impact because they have a lot of readers, they have a lot of impact because of who their readers are.

-Seth Godin

Seth's post is about attempting to figure out which among your readers are the ones who have the clout to really spread an idea. I recommend going over and reading the whole thing.

Part of the reason that I take the long view when it comes to investing time and effort into Cloud Culture is because I believe that with a persistent presence in the social web over time, nearly anyone with some skill can have some influence. In the almost five years since I started my other blog, I've seen some proliferation of my writing in a few fun forms. I recently discovered a thread at the Student Doctors Network forum that linked to a post of mine that I wrote while studying for a math class a few years ago. The biggest surprise was a couple of years ago, when I discovered an online course that had one of my posts on its syllabus!

Like Seth, I've long had an interest in attempting to quantify as much as we can about influence online, and what exactly happens when a piece of content goes viral. I had an idea for a study, in which you get a large sample of blogs, then attempt to figure out all the blogs that link to them, then figure out all the blogs that link to those blogs but not the original sample, and so forth for a few tiers. The idea would be to see how content that appears at the top tier is replicated down the others, or how it might even move up in the other direction.

Of course, the channels that content travels down is far more varied than just blogs that link to one another. Twitter often serves as an intermediary for content, as does Facebook, and content is often replicated in full and shared in places like Google Reader. Data on clout, which Seth is so interested in, is very elusive.

But that's part of the fun--after all, if figuring this stuff out was easy, it would be boring.