When the “A-List” stops being “The A-List”

So I was sitting at my local coffee shop this morning reading feeds, Twittering and writing. Not an unusual morning, but like other times a person gets inspired, it came from a comment from someone. This time from Jeremiah Owyang via Twitter. While talking about a the new Egos site created by Guy Kawasaki he Tweeted:

My recommendations to you: somewhere in the middle, develop your own feedreader of high value blogs and alerts everyone is unique

What occurred to me is that I didn’t think much about the a-list much any longer. While the semi-annual meme of beating on the a-list being a favorite sport for many bloggers, something any committed blogger will realize after awhile is that they develop their own a-list. This is simply the list of bloggers that they read and are influenced by.

It becomes less about the celebrity status of the blogger and more about the value of their content. I think it was Chris Brogan who started calling his personal list of favorites “Rockstars“, and it’s an apt title for a list of people who continually influence you on a daily basis. Hey I know good ‘ol Diamond Dave did that back in the ’80s for a heck of a lot of people. 😉

I’m sure a number of people are sitting back saying that I’ve missed the point of “The A-List”. They’d point out that this group of high-profile bloggers control the topics on Techmeme, Tailrank, et al. I don’t see that – I see a *lot* of great bloggers moving that conversation all over the place. At any rate, that’s not the point of this post. I’m really just talking about building your own list of blogs and bloggers that influence you.

Here are some opinions I’ve developed (though some are obvious 😉 )

There is no one definition of the A-List – everyone’s a list is different

“The A-List” everyone talks about are just bloggers – albeit with industry insight

The more time you spend reading in the blogosphere, the more important the content and less the celebrity status of the blogger

Your A-List will include high-profile bloggers, because of the value they bring to you, just like the lower-profile bloggers you read

I guess I just want to people to keep exploring and finding that content that has value to you. Don’t worry about if they are part of “The A-List”, there really are some great bloggers among them and many of their observations are relevant to the conversation that we’re looking for.

So, the A-List stops being “The A-List” when the reader realizes that each blogger brings value to the conversation and you start looking beyond who they are and more at what they say. What’s your take on this?

Photo credit: jzawodin