A Little Blog Perspective from Savage Chicken

Jim Kukral is trying to thread together a few data points, and looking for a smooth curve, but I don’t think he’ll find one. Kukral thesis? Because Robert Scoble can walk along the Apple store line livestreaming on Qik while chatting up a dispirited and apparently unresponsive crowd of early adopters, and because Jason Calacanis has declared he is giving up blogging, then somehow the A-List is dead.

Let me take this apart.

1. The new iPhone is not really early adopters. That was last year. This is the people that waited for it to drop in price, for all the kinks to be worked out (which wasn’t the case on Friday, but oh well), and not the bleeding edge types. Also, maybe Scoble’s star is falling.
2. The Calacanis blogicide is being done with the hucksterish hoopla that I’ve come to expect from Jason, who has an outsized PT Barnum personality. He’s giving up blogging to write — get this — an email newsletter. His motivation is to get down to something more like social scale, and to move away from feeding the blog beast day in and day out. Basically, after five years, he’s burned out on the medium. Fine, take a vacation. Mostly he’s beening flogging Mahalo, rather than contributing new insight to the world’s challenges (no offense, Jason).

Kukral goes off on a tangent:

[…]

Are you catching my drift? The thing we like to call “the a-list” is fading away. In fact, I think it might be already dead. Guys like Scoble and Winer and Calacanis and Arrington, and the rest, well, someone stole their mojo and they’re trying really hard to get it back by grasping at straws by trying to build the hugest Friendfeed list, for example.

But they’re not going to be able to get it back, even with a biggest list of subscribers. Their mojo has been stolen.

The a-list, if you ever believed there was such a thing (there was), is dying. No, let me clarify, it’s dead. It’s been eliminated. Not because those are bad people or they did anything wrong…

But because it’s just not needed anymore.

[…]

So why did the a-list die?

I’m sure you’ve got your own reasons. I don’t presume to have the right answers, but I have opinions. Here are some.

1. The a-list died because of social networking tools. It used to be that connecting with thousands of people could only be done if you had massive reach like an a-lister. However, with tools like Friendfeed and Twitter, anyone can reach out and “friend” up with anyone, causing millions of new connections of regular people.
2. The a-list died because the sharing of information became easier to do. In the past, the a-list was in charge of spreading the virus, but today is no longer needed, we can do it ourselves.
3. The a-list died because we used to have to rely on them to innovate and guide us to the new things. But we don’t need that anymore. We’ve reached a point where we have the knowledge and the tools to try things ourselves.
4. The a-list died because we’re tired of them and their incessant drama and posturing for attention. We all just decided enough was enough and called bullshit. It was bound to happen.
5. The a-list died because guys like Loren Feldman exposed them and made them just regular. You may or may not like Loren or his shtick, but there’s no denying he was a big part of satirizing them and bringing them crashing down to the ground.

It’s over. The revolution happened overnight and we didn’t even know it. We’re all now in charge, together, as one big group collective.

The a-list is dead.

Yes, Jim, the social revolution is moving forward, and it is changing a lot of things. We have new tools that are changing the way we work, communicate, and even the way we think to a limited extent. The technology underlying blogging hasn’t really kept up (in fact, I am working on a new presentation entitled Better Media Plumbing For The Social Web that I will be presenting in Berlin, at the Web 2.0 Expo there), and much of what has made blogging social — comment-based conversation — is moving from blogs and into social contexts where the flow is faster, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and Feedly.

But even as blogs have lost their preeminence, don’t believe for a second that the power laws are going away, that human sociality will shift from the unequal distribution of popularity and authority. Even if we move into smaller, less massive social systems — the tens or hundreds of thousands of Twitter users, for example, instead of the tens or hundreds of millions of blog readers — the same distribution of popularity, authority, and influence will arise. It’s an inevitable consequence of the wiring in our brains: the way that we perceive the world is based on the deep structure of our social mind.

The shift from Web 1.0 era social media to Web 2.0 social tools will not change human nature. It’s like taking a high school’s student body from their campus and putting them in a summer camp: the same social patterns emerge, just in a different cafeteria. We aren’t changing the roots of our sociality, we are just rearranging the furniture.

Different folks may rise in our regard in new contexts, like @pistachio or @megfowler on Twitter, but it will happen with the same dynamics as in every other social space.

So, Jim, the A-List will never die, although new stars and new social contexts will arise.