I somehow missed this when it first came out, but was recently directed to a fantastic Wall Street Journal article on a new wave of influencers and figured it was worth a blog posting.

I suppose it is simply a natural law that power-law distributions will gradually emerge in any controlled system - even those that are ostensibly constructed to be democratic in nature.

The Internet emerges as a network and within a few years, a minority of Web sites and portals garner the lions share of online traffic; then, blogging emerges as an communication practice and within a few years, a minority of top-tier blogs garner the majority of traffic online.  In some ways it seems inevitable that the same distribution would set into social bookmark sites.

The question of how to engage with bloggers has been puzzling buzz manufacturers for some years now and I suppose you can now layer in the question of how to engage best with the dominant users in social bookmarking communities.  There is certainly a void that seems to exist between those that want to connect with mass audiences online to promote their messages on one side; and those who have the influence to do so on the other side.

The article does a good job encapsulating some of the commercial attempts to systematize and commoditize these relationships but I haven’t seen anything that I find terribly sexy yet.