My sphere of influence.
What counts as being “influential” in the area of IT security punditry, anyway?
Being good at Not Letting Bad Things Happen doesn’t really land you in the top ranks of the influential. Being the Chief Speedbump on the Information Superhighway doesn’t endear you to people you work with, so I wouldn’t count that as positive influence either. I don’t have a large readership here, despite the best efforts of Alex.
But I have successfully executed a buffer overflow attack against two other bloggers, including the #16 Top Influencer in IT Security, so I guess that’s second-order influence, right there.
It would appear from the Top 59 List that being influential involves being part of the BlogClusterFoxtrot that is Security Blogging today. I read most of the bloggers on the list, but really only got to them because they all constantly refer to each other. So how do you move up in the ranks? By the number of trackbacks? Number of security blog memes that you start? The number of times you get quoted in mainstream media? Bruce Schneier probably wins on all counts.
The bloggers that have the greatest influence on me are the ones who teach me something new. That’s not too many, these days. I don’t care to read about the Sploit O’ the Day unless it comes packaged with a paradigm shift. I don’t care about who’s acquiring whom and for how much. To a certain extent, I’m interested in technical details IF I think they apply directly to me and my particular security challenges. I really don’t need to read someone’s ego-bloated ranting just for the sake of telling other ranters how wrong they are. But I do appreciate particularly elegant Security Snark[tm].
For those reasons, MY top influencers are, in no particular order:
Bruce Schneier
Marcus Ranum
Alex Hutton
The Matasano Gang
Ron Gula
Richard Bejtlich
Oh, there are other blogs on my blogroll, but these are the ones I consistently head to first, because they’re the ones that expand my horizons on a regular basis. Not that they’ll care, but thanks, guys.
Posted by shrdlu on Wednesday, March 28, 2007(5) Comments • Permalink •
