Michael Arrington, TechCrunch founder
Position: 35 Last year: Not ranked
Why? The power of blogging
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Michael Arrington is the founder and editor of TechCrunch - an influential blog founded in June 2005 that profiles and reviews new internet products and companies.
Arrington has a "huge amount of power" in the entrepreneurial and venture capital community, according to one of the Agenda Setter panellists, and his inclusion in the top 50 shows the growing power of the blogging community.
As well as writing about start-ups, Arrington has done it himself. Before founding TechCrunch, Arrington spent time as a corporate attorney working with technology companies on IPOs and other financial transactions
After this he worked for start-up RealNames and later co-founded a company called Achex, which was later sold to First Data Corp for $32m.
Take a walk down memory lane - and find out who made the agenda setters poll in years past
"Blogging's definitely got to the point where there're enough mainstream consumers watching it for the top bloggers to be regarded as agenda setters."
Michael Smith,
Agenda Setters panellist
"Open source gets more important rather than being something that will get squeezed out of the enterprise."
Simon Briskman,
Agenda Setters panellist
The world's 50 most innovative companies BusinessWeek
The world's 100 most powerful women Forbes.com
Chron 500 - The San Francisco Bay Area's top public companies San Francisco Chronicle
100 fastest growing tech companies Business 2.0
Content featuring Michael Arrington
There are plenty of other high profile tech personalities around too - Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com, and Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. Microblogging app Twitter is no longer merely the preserve of web 2.0 geeks.
Meanwhile, this year's vote also saw social networking and blogging make a real impression with Rob Pardo of World of Warcraft, Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and Cory Doctorow, editor of BoingBoing, all staking a claim to a top 50 spot.
The vote saw social networking and blogging make a real impression with Rob Pardo (23) of World of Warcraft, Michael Arrington (35), founder of TechCrunch and Cory Doctorow (41), editor of BoingBoing all arriving in the top 50.
The panel identified some of the leading tech bloggers - including Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, at 35. I think blogging's definitely got to the point where there're enough mainstream consumers watching it for the top ones to be...
Some would even include Michael Arrington at 35 - who occupies a kind of hybrid role of blogger, entrepreneur and investor. They might not top any single panellist's voting but the names to look out for are: Michael Moritz at 24, Daniel Rimer at 32...
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