Last week Perez Hilton broke the news that Fidel Castro had died. Word spread through the social mediasphere via twitter and a few bloggers in my circle of friends picked up on the news and shared it with their communities. The only problem is that Perez -- one of the web's most prominent bloggers -- was wrong.
This week, another blogger broke the news that the highly publicized but still-not-launched YouTube killer from NBC and Fox Interactive Media was finally eeking its way into private beta and now had a name (not content with ClownCo, as Google and the blogosphere took to calling it, NBC and Fox chose hulu.com.) Which blogger broke the news? Mike Arrington? Robert Scoble? Steve Rubel? Nope -- actually it was newbie Jonathan Burg (of "what is innovation" fame) who, in addition to breaking the news, snagged an interview with hulu's official spokesperson. Jon even got props from TechCrunch for the tip.
Kinda makes you question the very nature of influence... but in a good way.
If this isn't proof enough that there's something strange in the water this month, I've somehow cracked Mack Collier's recently revamped Top 25 Marketing Blogs, despite the fact that my Technorati authority (the data point that Mack uses to rank the blogs) has been on a steady decline for the past few weeks. Ah, these end of summer doldrums. :-)
