Some top Internet thinkers and why they should matter to you

Lists are not definitive. These are my personal choices, they reflect my interests and the topics I write (and rant) about on these pages, if you have other suggestions I'd be happy to hear about them. But I promise you, if you keep up to speed with the ideas of the people in this list you are going to sound pretty impressive when social media gets discussed at your workplace.

1. Tim Berners-Lee - Named as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century by Time magazine, this english computer scientist can be considered as the founder of the web (in the early 1990s) but perhaps his real significance was the decision to make his idea available freely (no patents and no royalties). Berners-Lee saw the web as providing global connectivity and of allowing everyone to be able to contribute content as well as consuming it. These ideas are still central to understanding the power of the web.

2. Dave Winer - His blog, Scripting News, is one of the longest running on the web. A computer programmer, Winer was instrumental in the development of RSS and, subsequently, podcasting. An evangelist for online participation, he organised the Bloggercon conferences. Winer argues that the web is now a publishing (and broadcasting) platform (not just a document storage facility) and I think we all need to bear that in mind in everything we do online these days.

3. Clay Shirky - Shirky is a New York academic, writer and consultant. His latest book is Here Comes Everybody. He did this great talk about cognitive surplus recently which argues that we are moving, through the Internet, into a much more productive age. The idea that the Internet creates tremendous value through the activity of (largely) amateurs is a key idea about much of social media and social networking online.

4. Andrew McAfee - McAfee is an associate professor at the Harvard Business School who came up with the idea of Enterprise 2.0. According to McAfee, in Enterprise 2.0: "The resulting organizational communication patterns can lead to highly productive and highly collaborative environments by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible." See my notes of a lecture he gave earlier this year. See also Ross Dawson's blog.

5. Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger;  are the authors of the cluetrain manifesto - published about a decade ago this book is almost a bible for millions of bloggers and social media enthusiasts. It is anti-marketing, advertising and all forms of corporatised communication. The first of its 'theses' states that 'markets are conversations' and this has become one of the most famous statements on the web. Its almost de rigeur these days to talk about 'conversations'.

6. Robert Scoble & Shel Israel are the authors of "Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the way Businesses talk with Customers", the book which largely extends the idea of 'conversations' to corporate communications has been both popular and influential. Formerly at Microsoft and now at Fast Company, Scoble is one of the world's most popular bloggers. He is prolific and hugely influential. Shel Israel is also at fast company and has a blog associated with the book.

7. Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz - these guys set up one of the world's first podcasts to deal with PR and social media, For Immediate Release, which twice weekly deals intelligently with ideas, issues and new products of interest and importance to anyone working in organisational communications in the web 2.0 era.

8. Steve Rubel is an online and social trends analyst for the global PR firm Edelman. He spends many hours everyday doing his analysis stuff and he knows a helluva lot about what is happening right now and what it means for tomorrow. Steve's blog Micropersuasion is also extremely popular and influential. Rubel has a passion for road-testing new web 2.0 tools and products, and many people get their news on this stuff from his blog.

9. Jay Rosen is an associate professor in the department of journalism at New York University. Rosen has been blogging at PressThink since 2003. He also blogs at the Huffington Post (the world's most popular 'blog').  In July 2006 he announced the debut of NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects.  The first one was called Assignment Zero, a collaboration with Wired.com.  A second project is OfftheBus.Net with the Huffington Post.  A third was introduced in November 2007: beatblogging.org ("Follow along as 13 reporters build social networks into their beats."). These experiments in a new type of journalism could prove to be very revealing about the future of the news media. Rosen sees some sort of interactions between professional and amateur journalists in the future. Probably no-one knows precisely what form that will take.

10. Joe Trippi is a long-time campaign worker and consultant for the American Democrats. He has also worked in Silicon Valley on projects involving ecommerce, building social communities and so on. In 2004, he was Howard Dean's campaign manager in the presidential primaries where he made innovative use of the internet for fundraising, something that is now routine with presidential campaigns. Trippi was largely responsible for the creation of an official campaign blog, and the use of Meetup and other social networking, techniques which are also now commonplace.

Comments

[Joe Trippi]

Trevor thanks for the shout out -- have always wanted to get to Sydney but have never been. If I ever get out your way it would be great to meet you and discuss where all this is going.

[Trevor Cook]

Thanks for dropping by Joe, if you get down here let's have a meal - it would be great fun