Kinda like the rise of the A-list bloggers, no?

I don’t know how many of you here are old enough to remember back to 2002, but I remember the launch of blogger and typepad, and I remember reading weblogs over the period of time between 2002 and 2004, and I remember how quickly there developed an A-list of bloggers. The guys who were going to conventions and writing and being written up in side-columns for major news media websites. Those people all linked each other, and how is linking to someone significantly different from digging, in the narrow case of promoting something you like?

The establishment of a hierarchy isn’t gaming the system, it’s an inevitable result of any social system.