It will, it will…. in time.

i guess it’s a lot like in the music industry:

The music that is most POPULAR isn’t neccessarily the BEST music that’s out there.Quite the contrary.For every Britney Spears there is a 1000 artists that would deserve to be on the top at least just as much as her and that are probably more talented as well.Just that noone knows these artísts.They’re out there, but they’re not POPULAR because nobody knows them.

Myspace et al is starting to change this situation a little in favor of those otherwise unknown artists but of course it’s still a struggle to get *really* good music to the masses.

Just because GOOD doesn’t automatically equal POPULAR and vice versa as we all know.

So with the A-list bloggers it’s just the same very familiar phenomenon i think.

are you referring to you ’secret innovation project’?

are you thinking about an anti-technorati?

And thanks very much for the thorough description of how HPG came to be! Not what I expected. I guess next time I should spend more time hanging around your About page

I don’t know if I even deserve to be listed as ‘A-lister’ as I’m waaaaaay behind GigaOm, Scoble, Sierra, etc. in the rankings, but I can explain HorsePigCow.

It wasn’t a marketing stint. It was a website I owned when I set out to start musing on this new online diary type thingy that someone inspired me to start (Joey DeVilla – Accordian Guy in Toronto, actually). I had three domains that I owned: Roguestrategies.com (my former company), Roguereport.com and horsepigcow.com. Because it started as a personal diary and as an experiment, I didn’t want to put it on my company domain (yet).

On my ‘About’ page, I discuss the name…which comes from a silly saying my Mom used to have. When she forgets someone’s name, she yells (almost tourets-like) ‘Horse Pig Cow!’ then recalls the name. It’s odd. We were on the phone when I was purchasing roguestrategies et al when my mom called me by my brother’s name, yelled HPC and then my own. I laughed. It was ridiculous, and I ended up purchasing the name right there. Two years later, I started blogging…and I owned the domain…so…

And I think I always meant to switch it to something more meaningful to what I do, but I never really found something quite right for it. Then, all of a sudden, people were reading me and subscribing to me and I was kind of stuck with it.

The farm animals are silly, but that’s kind of the point now. It’s not something to dazzle anyone. Quite the opposite. I operate in a very serious businessworld and my silly farm animals fly in the face of that. Plus, I was raised on a farm (we didn’t have pigs though), so it has the effect of reminding me of my roots. I hope most of my readers stay for the content. I know the name actually frightens (or used to anyway) many people AWAY from my site, so it’s actually the anti-marketing in that way.

Anyway…hope that answers your question. I don’t like the idea of A-list any more than the next person and it’s totally the antithesis of personal publishing anyway. Some people at the ‘top’ are totally power hungry. Others are there because they have rockin’ content (like Kathy Sierra). Either way, it’s like DIGG, you hit a tipping point and then oodles of people just subscribe to you because they think they should cause everyone else is. Doesn’t sound very democratic to me…:)

And you’re right, I think RSS does draw out the phenomenon I describe – good point.

Finally, I’d never heard the term MEATSPACE before. I think it’s hilarious.