The life of 12-year-old Adam Fuhrer, which takes place largely against the peaceful suburban backdrop of Thornhill, would seem as normal as any. He is tall, long-limbed and taciturn. He wears braces, which he shields shyly with a half-smile.

He loves his electric guitar, hanging out with friends, and is a close follower of the chancy playoff race in which his favourite team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, is currently embroiled.

"Dunno," he mumbles, when asked recently if they'll make it, shrugging and glancing at his feet – another gesture entirely typical of a 12-year-old boy.

But then there's this: In his bedroom, Adam has a computer. Through that computer, Adam transforms, from shy pre-teen to one of the most potent influencers in the rapidly growing world of social bookmarking.

On sites like Reddit (Adam's favourite), Digg (the largest of the group, with 20 million users), Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, Adam and other users talk amongst themselves, pointing out the latest, coolest, most interesting or just plain weirdest things they can find.

It's a realm that has quickly moved from chatty online fascination to a potentially potent marketing tool – a holy grail for niche advertisers for whom web ad-buying remains a relative shot in the dark.

Social networking sites pare down the guesswork as users like Adam drive heavy traffic to the sites they post. And the most important users are the ones that consistently lead where others follow – like 12-year-old Adam. Using an online pseudonym, which his father, Gerald, requested not be revealed in this article (Adam was "all right" with it being revealed; "You'd be `all right' with having your face on the front page of the paper," Gerald laughed), Adam scours about 100 of his favourite websites, looking for points of interest.

"Tech sites, blogs, news," he says, his hand over his face as he scans updates onscreen on his Google reader. When he finds items he judges to be sufficiently interesting – recently, a story on how Fox News devoted three times as much airtime to the death of Anna Nicole Smith than to the Scooter Libby trial; some images of a giant sinkhole in Guatemala City – he posts them on Reddit.com, one of a groundswell of sites where users share what they deem to be the tastiest tidbits found in the vast smorgasbord of information the Internet serves up, minute to minute, hour to hour.

Once they're posted, the community – in Reddit's case, several hundred thousand strong, from all over the world – votes, up or down, posting comments and creating conversation around the posting. If you're voted up, your story climbs the list and entrenches itself in the community's sightlines. Voted down, or not voted at all, and the story freefalls into oblivion.

Adam has been good at staying on top. He clicks on a listing of top users – those with the most "up" votes, which result in karma points – Reddit's measure of success.

"I'm here," he says, sweeping the mouse to the top of the screen. Number 8. "Not bad," he says, smiling shyly.

To some, it may seem that Adam is a particularly engaged hobbyist. He's interested in information, its churn, and, of course, the rush of competition.

Eight months ago, he and two friends joined Reddit at the same time. His choices skyrocketed, while the others foundered. "I got 500 karma right away, and they started saying `Adam, find us some stories to post.'"

In the end, his friends gave up. "They didn't want to compete with me," he smiles.

But Adam is also a member of an Internet vanguard which is helping, through its own naïve enthusiasm, to impose structure on a rapidly expanding, increasingly chaotic Internet universe.

"At the beginning, I didn't think anyone would vote for my articles," he says. He was quickly proven wrong, as he climbed user charts and stayed there for months. When the Wall Street Journal, in a story about the Net's most influential players, recently revealed his age, there was a furor online.

"Is Adam Fuhrer fictional? Is someone at the WSJ playing with our heads?" wrote one user, laprice. "Don't believe a word of it," wrote jamal, another user. "BUT he is 21, not 12."

An understandable, if entirely incorrect, assessment. (Adam's bar mitzvah is in June.)

"I just kind of sat back. There was a lot of controversy," he said. As the social bookmarking realm has grown, it has gone – like many things online – from community to corporate concern. CondéNet, the online division of publishing giant Condé Nast, recently acquired Reddit; Del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo!

The anonymity of the users raises an ongoing Internet controversy: Who is directing traffic on the Web – and why? Marketing companies already have their hooks into Digg, promising they can place clients on the site's front page. To do so requires those companies to pay off Digg users to vote up content, reducing the community's like-minded conversation to a sales pitch. (Digg and its brethren say they can police these pushes.)

As these sites mature into media phenomena in their own right, there is a resistance to over-regulate what was born as an open, egalitarian model. "It's been a wild experience, really," says Alexis Ohanian, the 23-year-old co-founder of Reddit.

So far, the corporate parent has allowed the community to evolve naturally. "We have a motto here – let the users do the hard stuff," Ohanian says. The original concept – self-policing, democratic community, built on common interests, still holds. For now, at least.

At his desk, Adam scans his reader, clicking through links, looking for things to post. He clicks one, and considers "House Creates Special Global Warming Committee," from the U.S. Congress, then dismisses it.

He eschews hockey news, despite his own interest. "People in Europe, or Asia don't care about that. They won't read it," he says. Nor will they vote on it, costing him valuable karma points. He's always looking for the home run – like the sinkhole, which scored him nearly 700 points. (Anna Nicole vs. Scooter Libby garnered a respectable 168.)

He settles on a story about Adobe Photoshop introducing image authentification, in response to a handful of photojournalistic images that were revealed to be doctored in the past year. But Adam is drawn less to the news than to the image that accompanies it: a diver climbing a rope ladder into a hovering helicopter beneath the Golden Gate bridge – and the massive great white shark leaping up to make a snack of him.

The image is dramatic, funny, and clearly doctored. "People click on pictures – which is funny, because it's `Reddit,'" he says, and posts it quickly.

Gerald watches with bemused pride. "At first, I was thinking, `What's he doing up there?'" he says. "Now, I tell everyone I know. I mean, it's crazy, right? He can find these subjects that start conversations that go for a thousand posts.

"He may start a conversation that changes the way someone thinks about something, and that's really interesting."