Onalytica is an organization that measures who has influence on issues, markets, and brands. A recent blog by Onalytica garnered a lot of attention in the blogging community as it attempted to rank the most influential authorities on blog marketing.

Some bloggers were caught by surprise as the rankings didnt measure just popularity (The number of links pointing to a blog) when defining the most influential authorities on blog marketing. Onalyticas ranking methods went deeper to also include another surprising variable the influence of the endorser (the linker). Onalytica used a system similar to citation analysis, which is what what academic journals and universities use to measure influence.

So Onalytica used its own mathematical formula to measure the most influential authorities on blog marketing. The following are their list of the top 20:

1. NY Times - www.nytimes.com
2. Hyku - www.hyku.com
3. Seth Godin - www.sethgodin.typepad.com
4. Micropersuasion - www.micropersuasion.com
5. Business Week - www.businessweek.com
6. Clickz - www.clickz.com
7. Wired News - www.wired.com
8. Next Level Biz Tips - www.nextlevelpartner.typepad.com
9. WebPro News - www.webpronews.com
10. Search Engine Watch - blog.searchenginewatch.com
11. Fast Company - www.fastcompany.com
12. Top Rank Results - www.toprankresults.com
13. Marketing Sherpa - www.marketingsherpa.com
14. Pro Blogger - www.problogger.net
15. All Business - www.allbusiness.com
16. Gaping Void - www.gapingvoid.com
17. BuzzMachine - www.buzzmachine.com
18. Church Of The Customer - www.customerevangelists.typepad.com
19. Twist Image - www.twistimage.com
20. Adrants - www.adrants.com

What does this mean for you? It could possibly mean that having just a single link from an influential source could be more important than a link from dozens of non-influential sources. I predict that influence, as computed by Onalytica, wil have an increasing effect on blogs in the future.