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This post is part of a series examining John August’s speech, The Challenges of Writing in a Digital Age.

The first of August’s four points is Authority. He said…

Writing in a digital age allows for extremely specialized authorities.

This is what many online marketers mean when they talk about how niche communities are becoming hot in internet marketing. Broad social media sites like MySpace and Digg are fun and addictive at first. But after a while, the infatuation fades. It was fun catching up with your old college buddies but soon you realize you don’t have as much in common. No hard feelings, you just find yourself connecting mostly with birds of the same feather in your current day life.

That’s where niche sites come into play. Whether you want to about entrepreneurship, making money online or Audrey Hepburn, there are bloggers in the know sharing their knowledge, establishing themselves as authorities.

But why would you want to be an authority? Because unlike expertise, authority is somewhat transferable. It’s a commodity. And I’d argue that in an information age, it’s one of the most valuable commodities out there.

Let’s establish the difference between experts and authorities.

There are a bunch of people making money from affiliate marketing. But not all of them are blogging about it. In fact, many like to keep their secrets to themselves for fear of being beaten at their own game. These people may be experts at affiliate marketing, but they’re not authorities. Their knowledge is not transferable. It’s their sites that are the commodities, not their information.

On the other hand, there are a bunch of people who are blogging about making money online. These people are establishing themselves as authorities. By doing so, they are spreading the net for success. Now, they can create opportunities to benefit from indirect monetization through books, speaking engagements, etc.

Still, you have to be careful of people establishing themselves as authorities.

The cliche thing for me to say is to question authority. Yes, it’s a cliche because it’s true–you need to always be looking at the source of a message to figure out whether it’s worth considering. Whether something was difficult to find–like that book in the library in 1988–or incredibly easy–like an article on Wikipedia, you need to be rigorous.

Not only is this crucial to your own process, but don’t let yourself be phased when people question your authority, which is something August encourages us to become.

But I want to move beyond Questioning Authority to set a more ambitious goal for you: Become an Authority.

I agree wholeheartedly. But the concept of authority has a wide range of implementations. Yes, some authorities end up being interviewed on cable news channels. But others simply have a solid base of blog readers or are voted up on Yahoo Answers. It’s up to each individual to set the goals and expectations as they see fit.

So how do you get started?

You become an expert by researching. You become an authority by writing. Writing consistently; writing fairly; and writing for an audience that is eager to hear about it. The internet has billions of readers. What it needs are writers who write with authority.

I’ll add one thought to this and it’s to write unapologetically. That doesn’t mean you never admit a mistake. It means to resist the temptation to start a post with “You might not agree with me” or “I’m kind of new to this” or anything else that permits your readers to take you less seriously.

Sometimes, it means to do more research to make your post substantial. And sometimes, it means posting in spite the fear that you might be wrong or face opposition.

That wraps up Authority as it pertains to writing in the digital age. In the next post, we’ll check out Immediacy.

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