The Anxiety of Influential

One notable feature of the end of the year is the emphasis on measuring the "most influential" media-makers in online digital ventures. Even NowPublic, which prides itself on its indymedia sensibilities as a site for the rhetoric of "crowd powered news stories," including this beautifully composed recent photo of Barack Obama, issues a list of top digerati in its "Most Public Index" for New York, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles.

The site explains its criteria for recognition as follows:

NowPublic’s formula gauges influence and “publicness” across four categories, including:

• Online Visibility
• Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
• Interactivity and Accessibility
• The “R” Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)
  

It is interesting to see how "influence" has begun to translate into "presence" or even "activity," as this separate list of the 150 most active designers on Twitter also seems to indicate.