The standard for measuring your online success or failure has always been in easy to represent numbers. How else would we know who to trust? Any crackpot with a blog can spout his views, but I want my opinions to be determined and spoon fed to me by the industry elite. You know, like TechCrunch or Leo Laporte. However, the online metric system always seems to be changing.

1996: Visible Hit Counters

Back in the early days of the Internet, these visible hit counters were all the rage. If you came across a random number on the bottom of the page you could tell instantly how important this site was. If the number was somewhere in the thousands or *gasp* tens of thousands, you knew that this site was absolutely trustworthy.

2005: Feed Subscribers

A few years later, someone decided that hit counters weren’t good enough for describing the quality of a site. Anyone could just make a site and hit refresh over and over again until the hit counter number was high enough to be trusted. This led to the use of feed subscriber badges. These numbers represent unique people as opposed to just hits. Instead of having a number that shows the amount of people that have stumbled across your site for some reason, this number shows those who subscribe to your feed so they don’t have to to come to your site at all. The more people that you have coming to your site without actually having to come to your site the more established you really are.

2008: Twitter Followers

Today the game has changed yet again. Now, to be respected as on online authority you don’t even need a site at all - you simply need followers. A follower is kind of like a mindless zombie that obeys your every command. To get these followers you have to have something called a twitter. With one of these twitters you can catch followers and make them do your evil bidding. One common way to catch followers is to follow as many people as possible hoping that in return they would be stupid enough to follow you back. However, the best way to catch followers is to give away something. It doesn’t even have to be real, just promise that someday, somehow you will give something of some value to one of your followers. Who can resist the allure of such a deal?

So, if you’re really important or just want people to think of you as such online, you better get with the times. Remember, the person with the biggest zombie army will always be the one with the true power.

Enjoyed this post? Digg it!