Carson of Buzzmetrics talks about the financial value currently hidden in the midlist. A blogger in the so-called midlist might be highly influential in their subcommunity.
One thing which I think might be interesting to add to the discourse, would be something around topicality. i.e. “influential on what?” Because BuzzMetrics is typically answering questions of influence within a commercial setting, we are rarely looking for “top bloggers.” We are looking for “top influencers amongst wireless application developers who happen to be positively inclined towards the Linux platform.”
Exactly. Many bloggers are not general celebrities but are influential in some domain. Compared to traditional research, blog search is a very low cost way of finding those networks of influence.