Nick Denton

NowPublic is one of the fastest growing participatory news networks in the world. Time Magazine voted it last year one of the top 50 websites and The Guardian UK declared it's one of the top 5 most resourceful news sites in the world.

They have come up with a way to measure "news influence" on the web. They insinuated that traffic to one's site and/or blog is not one of the lead indicators, but how the people listed are connected to others (especially other influencers) through social media like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and others.

I honestly don't know what to make of this list. I am at the same time amused and disturbed.

I already published at The Daily Gotham how it's weird that Arianna Huffington comes in at #2 because I thought she lived in California, not New York City. Then there's the grand daddy of the New York blogeratti, Nick Denton, coming in at #34.

It is though rather refreshing to see friends and colleagues on that list : Anil Dash, Nancy Scola, Joshua Levy, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung and one of my biggest inspirations as a web designer and developer, Jeffrey Zeldman.

Yet, and I repeat what I already said at our New York site, the most disturbing data point of this list is that I come in at #9.

Yup.

I am, as per NowPublic, one of the "top ten" news influencers in the New York new media market.

I will definitely have more to say about this new metrics system. Suffice it to say that I think it is not only thought provoking but vindicating.

It's cool that someone has been able to measure what I've been up to for the last two years : Building a sphere of influence through networked broadcasting and outside of the metrics of traffic volume or popularity.

As a former student of neo-baroque aesthetics and its network effect in arts, culture and communications, I felt inspired of the potential I saw on the web 12 years ago. It was a potential that I saw unfolding in the Net Art movement. And it was a potential that I saw come to a halt when Big Business, Big Media and Big Politics threw themselves on the net as a way to accelerate their hierarchical and teleological standards of growth and success.

Think of the 3 Bigs thwarting the growth of the net by imposing the growth of the walled web gardens a la Facebook, Daily Kos or The New York Times.

Yet networks are networks and old standards of influence and success will succumb to the net effect; not to the old measures as a result of the false scarcity and uniqueness created by popularity.

So, even though I truly believe this is a flawed index, it is by far the best attempt at measuring influence based on assumptions that are native to the technology and structure of community and communications on the web.