There an interesting argument going on in the blogosphere. Its captured nicely in the exchange between Tony Huang (deep Jive Interest) and Jason Calacanis:

Blogging is damn hard work, and harder still when you have kids to feed and are working lousy hours at work — and you don’t have the connections, notoriety or credentials to fuel your blogs success.

And let’s not discount it. When you have the ability to meet people most people don’t; when you have the inside track before most people do; and when you are actually *creating* news as most of us *can’t*, that’s what really separates “A-listers” from the rest of us.

I’ve come a long way in blogging, but I’m not blind to the fact that the vast majority of bloggers — even those who bring something new, refreshing, and regular to the table — may find barriers to blogging success in spite of hard work or their talent. I’d like to believe in the democracy of blogging, but the fact is that there are certain advantages that some bloggers have that others don’t. Not having them doesn’t mean you can’t be an A-lister, but I have yet to find one that didn’t have any.

I agree with Tony to a large extent although I am not sure blogging being hard etc. has anything to do with A-List bloggers trying to keep other blue collar bloggers down. Jason’s take on the A-List controversy:

What a joke… a couple of years ago Scoble, Jarvis, and I were the blue collar bloggers! We were hustling trying to get our vocies heard and a couple of years later–after blogging daily/hourly–the supposed “A List” got some traction and attention.

Here is a tip: THEY EARNED IT!!! They busted their butts for years blogging in an intelligent way. They were not given their seats at the table–they took them!

There is no “A List” — it’s a myth.

I think the basic issue really is that blogging is hard, and its getting harder to build the traffic with the proliferation of blogs. I guess it was easier when there were far fewer blogs. I this is just a manifestation of a lot of people feeling frustrated with the difficulty of blogging and building traffic. The other question is that do the A-List bloggers owe anything to the community in terms of helping deserving bloggers get more traffic? I am just not sure if the popular bloggers really owe anybody anything although it would be nice if they were more helpful and behave less as prima donnas.

But really, how could an A-list blogger help drive consistent traffic to another up and coming blog? Sure they could link to a particular blog to share the page-rank juice, do a hat-tip to another blog or even have guest writers…but if A-List bloggers did it consistently would it really work? Wouldn’t people start ignoring some of these links and guest writers? Given that some of the A-List bloggers are really busy, would having a guest writer on a blog even mean that the A-List blogger supports the writers views or even finds them interesting? I am just not sure that give the technology landscape right now, its possible for any blogger to really prop-up another outside and independent blog in a consistent fashion.

What do you think? Am I onto something or just high on something :-)?