No. 38 Tony Perkins, founder and editor-in-chief, AlwaysOn

Last year's position: Not placed

Tony Perkins qualifies for the Agenda Setters list on the back of the blogging phenomenon, having been credited with bringing it into the mainstream and giving it a corporate appeal that elevated it from a niche pastime to the big time.

His AlwaysOn site is a community portal for the tech world. It pulls together news, comment and opinion from industry figures, journalists and techies and also provides virtual networking. More importantly it has become a point of convergence for bloggers and symbolises the corporate blogging boom with an emphasis on subscriptions and advertising.

Of course there are those who would say the commercialisation of blogging is not a good thing and is, in fact, a development which denies its roots as mainstream media for the little guy. But accepting that blogging has changed forever, and will continue to go down this route, it seems likely that Perkins, a veteran of the publishing world who launched Red Herring, will end up being adopted by many as a figurehead for the move towards corporate blogging.