(CNN) — Don’t call me popular!
That seems to be the reaction from the Internet’s tech celebrities to a new Google-created list of interesting people to follow on Google+.
Robert Scoble, a popular tech pundit and blogger, actually asked Google to take him off the list of people to follow on the new-ish social network.
“I totally understand why Google did this list. It just isn’t a well curated list and so I don’t want my name associated with it,” he wrote Sunday.
In a follow-up post, he wrote that Google should promote thoughtful or popular posts on Google+, rather than turning a few people into celebrities.
“Why don’t we have a list of recent great posts in tech, politics, photography, science, education, entertainment, music, media, economics, etc?” he wrote on his Google+ blog. “Why do we need to focus so much on people?”
Craig Kanalley, a senior editor at The Huffington Post, also spoke out against the list, saying it promotes online celebrity over community.
“It’s going to alienate people and lead to an inevitable followers war that can hurt the health of the social network and inflate people’s egos,” he wrote Saturday, also on his Google+ page.
“As the famous get more followers, the non-featured fall farther behind, and a giant gap is created between the two. This is what happened on Twitter. (In a perfect world, all interact together, around common interests, and there aren’t such huge disparities.)”
The Google list includes people from eight categories, from technology to entertainment and a catch-all category called “fun and interesting.”
