Unlike The Influentials in Jon Berry and Ed Keller’s book about early adopters and their marketing potential, a new study by Onalytica shows the role of influentials in blog marketing.

In this list, Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion scores higher than Fast Company, and even Business Week. Onalytica is a British-based consultancy that monitors the influence factor on markets and brands. It has studied such things as the role of influentials in topics such as bird flu, stem cells and CSR, noting that measuring popularity is not the same as measuring influence.

The real value of such influence measurement is if they are grounded in context, they say. Especially in a world where keywords are so important, this study opens up a few windows into the field of ranking methods (Technorati, Google etc) that most take for granted.