What makes me laugh the most these days are people who claim to know how to make anything go viral and therefore influence a critical number of people to adopt an idea.
Granted that there are a lot of persuasive and brilliantly executed stuff on the internet, there hardly exists a foolproof way of putting an accurate metric that would show just how influential one is.
Visit counters, Alexa Ranking, Technocrati Authority, PageRank, the number of people in one's "community", how many votes you get for one contest or another, and other such measures are mere ego-candy. The fact is, any of these "influence" indicators can be "gamed", but that is not to say that these indicators are completely worthless.
I guess, the only proof of influence or how influential one is can be judged best by the effect you have on a population.
1 comment:
i'd like to think that some of us do succeed in influencing some people. the problem is how do you know for sure. even more difficult to determine is whether it was you or someone else with a similar message who made an impact on others.
ideas get spread around so fast, and unless your idea is totally it would be impossible for anyone to know for sure that it was him/her who got a specific idea to spread.
there are times when you notice that certain mainstream pundits such as columnists seem to write about exactly the same ideas as you did. again, you can never be sure if that columnist came up with those ideas on his/her own or if he just picked it up from some other source like a blogger perhaps or even you.
but who cares really who came up with the idea first? if you find others articulating the same things as you do then that should be good enough. it only means you're not alone.
for me, what's really funny is when a blogger brands himself/herself as influential or worse a guru.
oh well, it's all about self-promotion nowadays.
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