I’ve no idea how Klout works out it’s scores, but I’m guessing that there is an element of PageRank style algorithmic bootstrapping going on, in which a person’s Klout score is influenced by the Klout score of folk who interact with a person.
So for example, if we look at @briankelly, we see how he influences other influential (or not) folk on Klout:
One thing I’ve noticed about my Klout scrore is that it tends to be lower than most of the folk I have an OU/edtech style relationship with; and no, I don’t obsess about it… I just occasionally refer to it when Klout is in the news, as it was today with an announced tie up with Bing: Bing and Klout Partner to Strengthen Social Search and Online Influence. In this case, if my search results are going to be influenced by Bing, I want to understand what effect that might have on the search results I’m presented with, and how my content/contributions might be being weighted in other peoples’ search results.
So here’s a look at the Klout scrores of the folk I’ve influenced on Klout:
Hmm… seems like many of them are sensible and are completely ignoring Klout. So I’m wondering: is my Klout score depressed relative to other ed-tech folk who are on Klout because I’m not interacting with folk who are playing the Klout game? Which is to say: if you are generating ranking scores based at least in part on the statistics of a particular netwrok, it can be handy to know what netwrok those stats are being measured on. If Klout stats are dominated by components based on networks statistics calculated from membership of the Klout network, that is very different to the sorts of scores you might get if the same stats were calculated over the whole of the Twitter network graph…
Sort of, but not quite, related: a few articles on sampling error and sample bias – Is Your Survey Data Lying to You? and The Most Dangerous Porfession: A Note on Nonsampling Error.
PS Hmmm.. I wonder how my Technorati ranking is doing today…;-)
