Around a month back BusinessWeek ran this article on how Google was jumping into the fray of grading how influential people are — very similar to their page rank system for grading web sites. Seth Godin’s new book Triiibes has a very similar message. Tribes are powerful and you should strive to be the leader of a tribe to help the spread of ideas and build a community.
This is taking the “Karma” system used by crowdsourced news aggregators sites like Digg and Reddit to the next level. Below is an interesting presentation by Digg founder Kevin Rose that I found on SlideShare that shows they are planning to put more emphasis on the “Followers” phenomenan. The future of sharing and discovery is weighing heavily on how influential an individual is.
If you ask me I think Twitter has a leg up on all of them as the follower system is native to their system and a lot of the most influential people have already congregated around Twitter and started building their following. Plus Twitter is just too cool. If you would like to discuss this further feel free to follow me on Twitter @prashantkaw.
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