Does anyone care about klout

Is this number any less indicative of your actual online popularity than Klout's scores? As far as you know, no. I'm sure Klout has what it considers an excellent rationale for whatever stew of algorithms it uses to assign you a number, but neither you nor I know what it is, or more importantly why it's valid as an accurate determiner of your online influence and popularity. As far as any of us know, one's Klout score is determined by college interns, each feverishly rolling a pair of ten-sided dice, and then that number is allowed to oscillate within a random but bounded range every day to give the appearance that something's going on.

However, even if we did know the process Klout uses to determine one's influence, there comes the question of what purpose it serves. It serves Klout's purposes, it seems, in that they have a nice little business quantifying its members' desirability to companies who offer stuff to the members with the implicit agreement that they then talk about it on their social media sites. Good for Klout, and -- in the interest of accuracy -- I did get early access to Spotify out of them, and did write about it, so there you are.

But what purpose does it serve for Klout's members? Aside from the occasional quid pro quo freebie, it seems that what Klout exists to do is create status anxiety -- to saddle you with a popularity ranking, and then make you feel insecure about it and whether you'll lose that ranking unless you engage in certain activities that aren't necessarily in your interest, but are in Klout's.

In other words Klout exists to turn the entire Internet into a high school cafeteria, in which everyone is defined by the table at which they sit. This is sad, and possibly evil. It's especially sad and possibly evil because as far as I can see, Klout's business model is to some greater or lesser extent predicated on exploiting that status anxiety.

I clicked over to Klout's "perks" section not long ago -- "perks" being the freebie things the service wants you to market for them -- and rather than being presented with a selection of perks available to me, I was presented a list of perks I wasn't qualified for, because apparently I wasn't smart and pretty and popular enough for them, although Klout seemed to suggest that maybe if I did my hair a little differently, or wore some nicer shoes or dragged more people into their service, making myself more influential in the process maybe one day I could get the cool perks.

At which point I decided that Klout was actually being run by dicks, and getting let into Spotify a week early -- or whatever -- wasn't worth being seen with dicks, or supporting that particular business model. So now I'm out. You've heard of Twitter. Twitter is the contemporary canary in the coal mine of world events. A coup? An outrage? A celebrity death? Twitter gets the news out fastest, even mourning the loss of leading figures before they themselves hear they're dead sorry about that, Gordon Lightfoot.

But that doesn't matter. If you're on Twitter, or even Facebook, Klout has heard of you. And Klout has ranked you, with a single tidy number meant to sum up your influence and engagement in the social media sphere. Three years ago, it began ranking Twitter users according to the splash their links and witty repartee made among their followers. Since then, it's grown to include activity across social media platforms, and has established itself as a major arbiter of influence in social media circles.

Klout, in effect, has clout. Late last month, Klout altered its ranking algorithm. The Twitter canaries promptly launched into alarm mode, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

An OccupyKlout movement even sprang up on Twitter. The reaction pointed out three significant shifts now occurring in social media. Or, say, if you spent a whole day offline. Merciful heavens. If you had Klout anywhere above, oh, 55 or so, you may have seen a drop. The system ranks out of an ostensible , but it grades on what my undergraduate professors affectionately called "the British system": Basically, nobody except a superstar gets higher than Justin Bieber, King of Klout, hovers close to Ellen DeGeneres, that teacher's pet, has an Poor Jon Stewart only scores Klout had suggested before the shift that the majority of users would see their score stay the same or go down, but a straw poll of the canaries tweeting out sturm und drang on my Twitter feed on Oct.

Talking about Klout scores to a non-Klout-using audience sounds a bit ridiculous. Mind you, so did talking about Twitter in In the academic presentations I give, mentioning Klout is akin to bragging about the high score I got in Super Mario Brothers back in Except that unlike Super Mario, Klout and its ilk -- the increasingly complex measurements of influence known as metrics -- are poised for real-world impact far beyond social media.

Like Twitter. Social media has involved metrics from the beginning: comments, Technorati rankings, numbers of Twitter followers. In other words, these metrics will enjoy enormous influence. You have 1 free article s left this month.

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