What is this thing called Klout?

Several people invited me to look at a site called Klout, and so I did. I've been looking at it on and off for a month now, and trying to discover if it is of any use, and if so what it was useful for, and the answer, I believe, is "not much".

Some of the ideas behind it are quite intriguing, but I think it misses out in the implementation.

The stated aim is to show who influences you, and who you influence in social networks, mainly Twitter, and which topics you are most influential in, and to give your "influence" a numerical score. I'm not sure how the score is calculated, but the calculation appears to be based on how many people retweet your tweets, and how many Twitter followers they have.

Does it succeed?

I don't think so.

I wrote about my initial impressions of it here and here, and my initial impressions have not changed much. I did link to a rather scary article, What Your Klout Score Really Means | Epicenter | Wired.com, which indicates that some people take the Klout score quite seriously, and that some people's jobs depend on it. That's about as idiotic as it gets. You might as well decide to hire or fire someone on the basis of their newspaper horoscope.

One of the things that makes me think that it's nothing more than a fun (for a little while) online toy is that its list of topics is altogether screwed up. And so is its way of calculating influence in the topics that it does list.

Among the missing topics that I noticed were:

• Anglican Church
• trade unions
• liturgy
• missiology
• icons, ikons, ikonography, iconography
• art
• Orthodox Church

Can anyone add to it? If you have looked at Klout and noticed some missing topics, perhaps you could list them in a comment.

To give just one example, one of the people I follow on Twitter is Zwelinzima Vavi, the General Secretary of Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions). So if there is one thing he influences people in, it is trade unions. But can you say that on Klout? Not a chance.

It had a rather convoluted and difficult-to-find category of the Orthodox Church, and as I blog about that quite a lot, several people indicated on Klout that I had influenced them on that topic. But yesterday Klout decided to change all my topics around, and removed that one, and a few others, and put in a whole lot of new topics in which it thinks I am "influential". These included:

• health
• feminism
• atheism
• LGBT
  
• celebrities

As I said, I'd love to know what algorithm Klout uses to calculate these things.

OK, I did tweet on a "health" topic today (about organ donation), but that was after I had seen my changed topic list.

Some of the blogs I read (and bloggers I follow on Twitter) are members of the Anglican Church, and have influenced me on that topic. But can I say so on Klout? No.

What it offers for "Anglican" are:

• All Saints Anglican Church (museum)
• The Riverina Anglican College (university)
• Wollondilly Anglican College (university)

That's it.

So which one do I use for the Anglican Bishop of Buckingham, Alan Wilson? His blog is in my blogroll and I follow him on Twitter, but his main sphere of influence is missing from Klout.

What Klout has is sub-sub-topics, but no main topic for people like him.

Out of curiosity I Googled for Wollondilly Anglican College, and found, somewhat to my surprise, that it actually exists. But it is not what I would call a "university". And it's not really a topic on which the Anglican Bishop of Buckingham has influenced me.

But when I looked up Alan Wilson, Klout also noted that both Alan Wilson and I used Twitter as the primary way to spread our influence. That's funny, because two days ago it said that 93% of my influence was spread through Facebook. I think it is sulking because it keeps asking me to invite my Facebook friends to Klout, and for the most part I haven't done so. And one reason for not doing so is that the topics in which they have influenced me are missing from Klout.

A little earlier, I compared Klout to a newspaper horoscope. A more apt comparison might be a toy that we used to play with in Grade 2. I haven't seen one for years, but it was made out of folded paper, and someone would come up to you and ask you for a number between 1 and 10, and they woudl move the paper that number of times and an open it to reveal four coloured flaps, and ask you to choose a colour. Then they would lift one of the coloured flaps revealed and read out your fortune, which they had written there beforehand.

I think Klout works a bit like those.

I might stick around on Klout a bit to see if it improves, but I somehow doubt that it will.

What is Klout, and how well does it work?

A few days ago I wrote on my other blog about some online software tools, among which was Klout, which I've been trying out Some online software tools | Khanya.

Klout is a website that purports to tell you how much influence you have in social networks, and who you are most in contact with. First impressions were difficult to gauge, because I discovered that Klout takes a bit of time to get up to speed. It starts off by adding your Twitter followers (or is it followees) as "friends" or "influencers", and then after a day or two goes on to Facebook, Google+ and other networks. So you probably need to use it for a week or so to see how it actually works.

Even after a week, however, it becomes apparent that it is heavily weighted towards Twitter. If you want to list your "friends" it loads the people you follow on Twitter, rather than your Facebook friends, for example, and it appears to display them in random order. Taking one of my blogging friends, Miss Eagle, and doing a comparison, I can learn what Klout thinks are our spheres of influence:

Sorry if that's a bit hard to read: you can blame the new and downgraded Blogger interface, which does not appear to let you adjust the size of such pictures before posting them. What it says is that I do 93% of my stuff on Facebook, while Miss Eagle does 100% of her stuff on Twitter. And it also says "You use Facebook as the primary way to spread your influence. Twitter is Miss Eagle's primary network of influence."

How accurate it is, I have no idea.

One of the things I remarked on in my original post was the topics in which Klout appeared to think I was influential: Some online software tools | Khanya:

Among the rather strange things Klout tells me is that I am influential in Singapore (first and last time I was there was back in 1985) and that I’m more influential in “Celebrities” than in “Christianity” — if you look at the tag cloud in the right side bar you’ll see that “Christianity” is quite big, and “celebrities”, if it appears at all, is very small.

I've since discovered that this can be altered in various ways. You can remove topics that don't really interest you. You are also given points, and you can use these to add new topics to either your own page, or to those of your friends and influencers. For example, I used five points to add "Socialism" to the topics on which another blogging friend, Chris Hall, had influenced me. Klout had apparently not detected it, and once I added it, it moved to the top of his influential topics.

But the "topics" of influence also seem arbitrary, and quite bizarre, and this, I think, is one of the biggest weaknesses of Klout. I wanted to add "Missiology", which is my academic speciality, as well as that of a lot of other people in my network, but Klout would not let me. It was not in the "topic dictionary" The nearest I could find was "Theology", which is fine as a generic topic, but I also saw "The California Pacific School of Theology (Japan)", and a couple of other similar entries. That is a really silly topic -- if you are going to add one theology school, you should add them all, but surely a "topic" is for a discipline, not a single institution. If a single school can have a topic all to itself, then surely every single theology school in the whole world should have its own topic? But it makes more sense to have a discipline as a topic, and not to include only a couple of the institutions where that discipline is taught. Yet a whole discipline, Missiology (aka Mission Studies), which is found in hundreds of schools around the world, has no topic at all.

I wrote to Klout about this, and their reply awas not reassuring. I also looked to add "Church History" as a topic. Nothing doing. They offered "Church", "Baptist Church" and "Winston Churchill".

"Baptist Church"? What about other denominations? Try "Anglican Church"? No, nothing doing. You can have "The Riverina Anglican College (University)" as a topic, but not the "Anglican Church" or "Anglican Communion".

And it gets worse. Not only can't you have Church History, you can't have History. You can have Black History Month, but you can't have History.

Now Missiology may be a fairly obscure academic discipline, but History is big. But sorry, historians have no Klout, not even if they are black historians. They only haveKlout if they are Black History Monthians.

I would thus say that Klout's topic dictionary is well and truly screwed up. It is badly thought-out, badly designed and badly implemented. It has lots of very narrow sub-sub-topics, but in many cases the main topics that they should be under are missing.

In the light of that, news stories like this are very scary indeed: What Your Klout Score Really Means | Epicenter | Wired.com:

Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.
The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

Consider the case that I mentioned above -- Chris Hall. Klout had not picked up "Socialism" as one of his topics of interest, yet when I added it, it turned out that he was more influential in that than in any of the topics that Klout did pick up. And perhaps Klout had done something similar with Sam Fiorella in the story above, but because he did not know about Klout, there was nothing he could do about it.

If these things are flawed, there's no way of telling how Klout calculates influence even on the flawed and inadequate data it uses -- what if its algorithms are as flawed as its data?

Klout is an interesting concept, and it is quite fun to compare yourself with your friends and to see which topics you are interested or influential in. But I'm not sure how seriously it can be taken when its data are so obviously flawed.

You can do something to improve it, though. You can check your friends, and see if their topics reflect those that you discuss with them most frequently. You can help to make their scores more accurate -- provided, of course, that their areas of expertise have made it into Klout's topic database in the first place.

Oh yes, and if you're feeling kindly disposed towards me, please retweet a few of my tweets. It's not that I'm looking for a job in marketing or anything, but you never know when you're going to need it.

Farewell to MyBlogLog friends

I suppose it's time to say goodbye to my MyBlogLog friends.

MyBlogLog provided the little widget that showed who had visited my blog, and, if they were themselves bloggers, provided a link back to their blogs. I've spent many hours surfing blogs that way -- following someone who visited my blog, and then someone who had visited their blog and so on. If one wanted to visit a blog again, one could join that blog's "community" and have a list of them, so it was a form of social blogrolling. You could have your own blogroll, but also see other people's blogrolls on MyBlogLog, and I've found many interesting blogs in that way.

But that's all ending on 21 May, since MyBlogLog was taken over by Yahoo, and Yahoo have announced that they are killing it on that date. So on the right is the "in memoriam" of what the MyBlogLog widget used to look like, frozen in time, something to remember it by, a preserved piece of blogging history.

Tomorrow we'll be going away on holiday, and by the time we get back, MyBlogLog will be gone, so the time to say goodbye is now. I may add some of the blogs I used to visit on MyBlogLog to my regular blogroll, but I'll probably forget some of them, and so will tend to lose touch. While we are on holiday I may ocassionally manage to post something at a wireless hotspot, but the places where one accesses those are not usually conducive to blog surfing.

There is also BlogCatalog, which was similar to MyBlogLog, but it was revamped about six months ago, to make it more difficult to navigate and use, and most of its functionality has gone. I'll leave the widget up while it still works, but I won't click through to the BlogCatalog site much, because even though some of the stuff is still there, it's very difficult, if not impossible to find any more.

Perhaps some of my MyBlogLog contacts will still visit my blogs, but I'll never know if they have done so unless they leave comments. So farewell, Adios, Hamba kahle -- maybe we'll see each other again, maybe not.

Follow me...

Follow me on Tumblr.

Wherever you go on the web these days you see exhortations to "Follow me!"

Usually it's on Twitter, but quite often it's on other sites as well. I suppose it's part of the Twitterisation of the web. Some social networking sites that used to have "friends" now refer to "followers".

I gather that you can also get software that will go through the people you follow on Twitter and remove those who don't follow you in return. That seems strange to me. I've never asked anyone to follow me on Twitter, other than my own immediate family, and none of them are on Twitter anyway.

Twitter used to say that what you should tweet about was "what are you doing right now". It was a bit silly because the only possible answer one could give was "tweeting on Twitter". Now they've broadened it a bit to "what's happening?"

But I've never asked anyone to follow me on Twitter, and I don't ask or expect anyone I follow on Twitter to follow me in return. I follow people and groups that interest me, and find the easiest way of doing it is through the Daily Paper. which gives a digest of the main links. It's not perfect, as it doesn't show every link, and I'm not sure what selection criteria it uses - I suspect that it may give preference to links to articles that have pictures, which are not always the most interesting ones.

But I don't ask people to follow me on Twitter.

Follow me on Tumblr.

Why Tumblr?

Tumblr is probably one of the most underrated things on the web.

It's a sort of quick 'n dirty blog site, where you can post stuff by e-mail, or in various other ways with a minimum of effort. It's a kind of blog site for non-geeks, for people who are not web fundis, and makes it easy for ordinary people to use. The trouble is that it is a non-geek site that only geeks know about and use. You don't have to know HTML or CSS or any of that fancy stuff. It's WYGIWYS -- what you get is what you see.

Follow me on Tumblr.

No, I don't mean that literally.

Yes, you can follow people on Tumblr in the same way as you can follow them on Twitter. It's like Twitter except that it's not limited to 140 characters, and you can log in and see a feed of all the people you "follow". But you can also just go in there and read it, without having an account.

So why should you follow me on Tumblr?

Three of my blogs feed into Tumblr, and so you can see a digest of the recent posts and links to them. If one of them catches your fancy, you can click on the link and go to the full post and read it, and comment if you like. And if it doesn't interest you, you can skip it.

I post in various blogs, depending on the topic and the content and how I want to format it. Most, but not all of my theological stuff goes on Khanya. Most, but not all of my political and general stuff goes on Notes from underground (that's this one). And stuff about books and literature can go in either. And then there are the family history and genealogy ones.

Instead of going to each of them in turn to see if there are any new posts that might interest you, or getting an RSS feed of one and missing the others, or of all three and wasting bandwidth on stuff you don't want, you can go to Tumblr and see if there is anything that interests you or not.

Blogger, the software for this blog, has a "Blog this" feature, which I use quite a lot. It grabs a paragraph or two from a web site and lets you use it as the basis of a blog post, but it usually needs tweaking and fiddling with HTML to get it looking half decent. But sometimes one doesn't want to do that. You just want a link to a web site to remind you what it was about and share it with others, perhaps. Tumblr lets you do that easily -- for example this one, about a steam engine that rescued passengers from electric trains stranded in the snow.

I call my Tumblr site Marginalia. If my life as I live it and experience it is a book, those are some notes and comments written in the margins.

No, Tumblr isn't perfect, and I'm still playing around with it to see what it can and can't do, but if you want to "follow" me anywhere, then follow me on Tumblr.

Entropy in the blogosphere: the disintegration of social networking

One of the good things I have found about blogging is that one can find people interested in similar things and exchange ideas with them. There are various tools, like blogrolls, for finding bloggers who say interesting things.

In the past I've found social blogrolling tools, like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, useful for this. But both have recently become considerably less useful, though for quite different reasons. BlogCatalog, as I noted in a recent post, recently decided to change the way it looks and works, and shot itself in the foot. With its reduced functionality it is almost useless.

MyBlogLog continues to function, and it is the behaviour of users that is the problem.

Both of them had little widgets (or "gadgets" as Blogger calls them) that you can put in the sidebar to show who visited your blog. And that is a reminder to me to visit their blogs. OK, some people don't show up there because they read blogs through RSS feeds. But others don't show up there because they have taken themselves out of MyBlogLog entirely, though their blogs remain there like orphaned children.

Here are some of the abandoned ones:

Bishop Alan's blog
The Stroppy Rabbit
Calum Carr's take on... whatever

Some are still there, but have removed the widget from their own blogs:

Skewed view
Conjectural navel gazing: Jesus in lint form
The poor mouth

While others never bothered to put the widget on in the first place.

The trouble with that is that it makes it more difficult to surf from blog to blog -- I visit the blog of someone who has recently visited me, move on to someone who has recently visited them, and so on. But with the widget gone, there's nowhere to go but back. So I'm beginning to feel constricted, as if the number of options is shrinking. It's all rather sad.

On my family history blog I discovered that most of those who visited (as shown on MyBlogLog) were not interested in family history or genealogy, and some were just spammers. But in that field someone revived an old device -- the web-ring. Web-rings let you surf from site to site following a similar theme. The problem with static web pages was that once you had seen them all, you had seen them all. Great for new visitors, but not for people who had seen all the sites. With dynamic web sites, like blogs, however, it is ideal. Each time you visit there is likely to be new content. So perhaps things are not so bad after all. I just have to find a web-ring for this blog, which is such a mixture of stuff it is difficult to fit into any category at all. So, goodbye BlogCatalog, hello blogrings.

Social blogrolling - controversy on MyBlogLog

There's been a bit of a tempest in a tea cup over a new feature of MyBlogLog -- the ability to send messages to all one's community members.

Some, like Meg in Australia, have complained that it is spam, but it seems that those who are complaining have joined hundreds of communities that they have no real interest in.

And I disagree. I think being able to send a message to all one's community members (provided it is not overdone) is a good thing. Perhaps some will abuse the facility by sending spam, but then the answer is simple -- leave their community. But a message once a quarter or even once a month should not be a problem.

I think "community" means that one desires to interact with others in the community. If people join communities on MyBlogLog and similar social networking sites, they ought to be interested in the topics of the community and in interaction with the members. If they do not want to communicate, they should not have joined the community in the first place.

In my blogs I have tried to make it clear what I am interested in and what I blog about, and I do that in MyBlogLog too. I hope that people who are interested in similar things will read my blogs and comment, and join my communities in MyBlogLog so we can keep in touch, and so I will be reminded to look at their blogs occasionally.

But some people seem to join communities just to see how many they can collect. I have difficulty in understanding the motivation for joining a community where one has no interest in anything the community is about. If you join a football club, and have no interest in football, why did you join? If you then object to receiving the club newsletter, don't complain to the post office about the club sending you the newsletter, just resign from the club.

I have the same problem with people on social networking sites like MySpace, whom I've never heard of, saying "I want to be your friend". If they've read and commented on my blog, or we've discussed things in a newsgroup, or exchanged e-mail or snail mail, or communicated in some other way, fine. But just to be a "friend" with no discernable common interest with me makes no sense.

One of the problems of electronic networking is that it can lead to communication without community. But the sudden demand from people on MyBlogLog for community without communication is far more difficult to understand.

Social blogrolling

Many blogs have blogrolls - lists of blogs that the author of the blog likes to read. But I'd like to invite bloggers who read this blog to go a step further and have a pictorial blogroll, which you can get by going to MyBlogLog.

How does this differ from an ordinary blogroll? Well, you can go to the page for this blog, and see the blogroll in reverse -- not just the blogs that I like to read, but the people who've bookmarked this blog because they like to read it. And you can click on their icons to see a list of their blogs.

Also, each blog and blog author has tags. Once upon a time Blogger (the software that runs this blog) allowed you to go to the blog author's profile and see a list of their interests. Then you could click on one of the interests that is your interest too, and find other bloggers with that interest.

Unfortunately it doesn't work any more (like many other featured of the "fully-featured" new Blogger).

But never mind - MyBlogLog has a workaround. Click on the tags, and you will see other bloggers who are interested in that topic, and blogs that deal with that topic. Things like Facebook and MySpace give you social networking, but MyBlogLog gives you social blogrolling.

One of my main interests is missiology, and at the moment there are very few blogs on MyBlogLog with that tag. Yet there were quite a lot of bloggers with that listed as an interest in their Blogger profiles. Unfortunately one can no longer find them that way, but if they listed it in MyBlogLog, the problem would be solved. And it would be nice if some of my fellow Orthodox Christian bloggers did the same thing, and then put a widget like the one below on their blog. Try it and see.