Courtesy of James McNally's newly-relaunched Consolation Champs (and c'mon, James, make with the redesign already – standard templates are teh suck) comes this somewhat depressing new look at blogebrity. Kineda used Technorati to reach its new definitions for what makes an "A-list" weblog, a "B-List" weblog, and so on. These new criteria are as follows:

• D-List (Low Authority): 3-9 blogs linking in the last six months
• C-List (Middle Authority): 10-99 blogs linking in the last six months
• B-List (High Authority): 100-499 blogs linking in the last six months
• A-List (Very High Authority): 500+ blogs linking in the last six months

It's probably fair to say that I am not an A-lister. What's kind of sad, however, is how quickly the lists can flip. Of Kaneda's list of blogebrities, there's not a single one that I read regularly, and Kottke isn't even on the list! A few years ago I felt like I knew a pretty decent number of the A-Listers through SXSW and was friends with a solid number of B-Listers and C-Listers, also through SXSW. Now, though, just like media decentralization has resulted in the fragmentation of pop culture, I think we're also seeing the emergence of fractured, uh, blogebrity. Either that or my circle has fallen out of favor, which is admittedly something of a possibility. I'm still mourning the loss of powazek.com, although I know Derek's got more important things on his mind.

I also have to admit to feeling a little bummed about dropping so low on the rankings. I'm lucky to qualify as a D-Lister now – this shouldn't be horribly surprising, actually, since I shuttered Inkblots and moved Tip of the Quill with relatively low fanfare. (A trivia point: Tip of the Quill has always been the name of my editorial at Inkblots, which means I could arguably claim to have been blogging since 1995/1996. Heh.) More to the point, it's driven home that I haven't been blogging as much as I should, that I need to look into syndicating this blog wherever I can, that I should work harder to read and comment on more blogs out in the world, et cetera, et cetera.

Further rumination on the whole decentralization/fragmentation thing: lately I've been wondering exactly how much it would cost to live the way I want to live. If in the future we're not famous for fifteen minutes but to fifteen people, how much do we have to charge those fifteen people for our stuff to survive? How much would it cost Joss Whedon to revive Firefly on a subscription basis? How much would it cost to produce Firefly only for an IPTV channel? How much revenue could be generated by distributing Firefly only through the iTunes store?

Something tells me I'm going to be struggling with these questions long after I get out of here... This spring's project (aside from the thesis and two paper presentations): find somewhere that will pay me to do that!