kidmercury

We've been talking a lot about the creation of new hierarchies as old hierarchies collapse. The new hierarchies that arise in digital communities come from the bottom up, rather than being established by existing authorities from the top down.

Continuing this theme, let's take a certain look at communities I'm a part of and how they are creating their social hierarchies (and how well I'm doing.....or not doing! )

1. SeekingAlpha. SeekingAlpha collects articles from people offering commentary about the financial markets. I'm not sure how many contributors they have, but I've cracked the top 100, and am sitting at 74 at the time of this writing. So what's this mean? Well, I don't think it means much; after all, the leaderboard will be biased towards people who trade stocks (because that is what most people trade, even if the stock market is not a good investment opportunity and higher returns can be obtained elsewhere) and will also be biased towards people who contribute lots of articles (I was writing an article a day to promote my trading site). So to me, this leaderboard is not really doing a good job of establishing much of a meaningful hierarchy. For instance I plan to discontinue writing a daily article (there are only so many ways you can say buy gold, short sell long-term treasuries ), so I will probably fall in the leaderboard, though this will not be a reflection of whether I am doing better, worse, or the same in comparison to the SeekingAlpha community in terms of analyzing the market.

On tangental note, I just wanted to hate on SeekingAlpha for always changing the titles to my articles. I don't really care that much but it's just annoying because I write an article that has a goofy headline because that will get more clicks and than SeekingAlpha goes and changes it to something boring, so then I'll get fewer reads of my articles, and on top of that people will think I came up with the dumb ass headline they changed it to. F'd up, no doubt.

2. Techmeme. While SeekingAlpha collects articles from submitters and runs things through an editorial process to classify it and make sure it is of sufficient quality, Techmeme simply finds the hot technology discussions of the day and links out to them. Its leaderboard is a great indicator of who's got influence in the technology press. I am a fan of Techmeme and think it is doing a great job; in my eyes, it's legit. I wonder about their business model, though, as I would think they would benefit either from turning themselves into a web service that other services can integrate or by enabling comments and building a community.

On a personal note, I am bummed out that I been dissed by Techmeme, never having made an appearance on there in spite of my numerous technology commentary articles as well as my efforts to befriend the Techmeme crowd. I really wanted my song for Marc Andreessen to get on Techmeme as a news topic in the technology community, LOL that would've been hilarious (though Techmeme can probably filter stuff like that out). But you know how it is, the obstacles that people put up to blind themselves from the Truth can only be removed by themselves.

3. YouTube. Well, I was really hoping that my brand of conspiracy pop music would be appreciated by folks around the world, but alas, that does not seem to be the case. The primary indicator of hierarchy and influence on YouTube is number of subscribers and number of aggregate views, and I'm not doing too well in either department. Just 170 subscribers at the time of this writing. The problem with the big social networks is that they are too big; they are becoming less effective talent filters. This is why, as we have discussed numerous times before, niche social networks will prove to be more effective talent filters than the "catch all" social networks like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. At least for now, though, I think YouTube's subscriber count is the best hierarchy tool out of any massive social network. More meaningful than friend count on MySpace, or follower count on Twitter.

I should also mention Covestor, which is a leaderboard of sorts that tracks stock market traders real returns. I prefer content-based communities as I think they are more commercially viable in the long-run, but I wanted to give Covestor props for being able to track real returns and create a leaderboard for traders. There is lots of trash talk amongst people who make market calls so Covestor is providing great fodder for beefs. You know that's going to make me a fan!

Where Do We Go Now?

From my extremely biased viewpoint the answer is obvious: why, niche social networks, of course! To understand the logic, recall our map of the future of the web. In the context of our map, a company like Google/YouTube is an aggregator business -- it is great for collecting and hosting content, but not for filtering. New companies need to emerge dedicated to filtering and reclassifying (Techmeme could be here, as well as semantic web companies). Still new companies need to take this filtered, reclassified information, and turn it into a service by creating a community around it. This is where bloggers come in, and why blog-based communities are the future of social networking and social hierarchies. The meaningfulness of the hierarchy will be a testament to the community's popularity and brand trust.