Via my Twitter account today I ran across an article on Mashable about how you can ‘Measure’ a person’s influence online.  It was a good article, but what really stuck out to me was the comment the author, Micah Baldwin, said at the end:

…since Technorati’s Authority Rank stopped consistently updating (read: lost the trust of bloggers), there hasn’t been a single tool for measuring the potential online influence of an individual blogger. Until that happens, the best measure is getting recommendations from friends.  After all, there is nothing that will beat a simple recommendation for uncovering influential people both online and offline.

And I really couldn’t agree more with him. One of the things that I do anytime I need to know something is to reach out to others around me who I think might know the answer. If by chance they don’t, 9 out of 10 times they know someone who does. Plus contrary to what you might think, people really do like helping other people. Especially across the internet.

So in essence the measure of someone’s influence online or offline is dependent upon whether or not you ask them for help. So maybe you should take some time today to make someone influential.