well said. small fish in the ocean, big fish in the pond.

I'm afraid as a Z lister I would tend to disagree. We are all held back by our minds more than by the A listers. When I organised a conference on blogging (my first conference of any sort) I was truly stunned by how helpful guys like Doc, Scoble etc etc where. In fact the biggest disappointment was trying to get non-speakers to turn up! (At what point I had more speakers than delegates!

The analogy of the A-Z gap to that of the gap between the rich and the poor has been noted by many who've studied both problems. The conclusion is that the observed power law distribution is due to the way the Web evolved--as a "scale-free" network of hubs and nodes--which actually mimic human social networks. The economics of links and web popularity are apparently the same as economics in the real world. Bemoaning the problem and solving it are the same in both cases: more freedom and democracy. One thing I've noticed about the A-Listers too, they generally have no time for anything else but keep the gate. They are generally "linkers" not "thinkers" though no blogger falls into a simple set of labels. Google itself is I suppose A#1 "blogger-linker."

An interesting way of "seeing" the topology of the network is with a tool called TouchGraph Googlebrowser, which you may know about.

(thanks first time here from far far away...)

At one point I had more speakers than delegates!

I think this sums up the problem of the sociopolitical blogosphere quite nicely.

more freedom and democracy

That doesn't solve the problem at all - you can't determine who the popular bloggers are by elections!?

I think talking about the A-list in terms of gate-keepers is just whiny victim bullshit.

There will always be inequality, it's often a *positive* symptom. To claim otherwise you have to find a specific market failure/distortion.

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2005-08-11-AlistEnvy

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/IncreasingReturns