There is something about having a private company controlling reputation on the web that's quite disturbing to many.
And while I don't think your average HN reader places much importance in Klout scores as a measure of reputation and influence, mass media outlets are certainly starting to.
No transparency, quantity over quality, higher scores the more personal data you fork over -- this is all movement in the wrong direction.
Google is a private company that controls your site's reputation via PageRank -- assuming most of us have a personal site/blog, how is this that much different?
While it's true that Google is in a sense a gatekeeper to people's personal sites, it doesn't claim to be an arbiter of your page's (or your) reputation. Rather, it only claims to be a judge of a page's relevance to the terms a user searches on.
Google absolutely is an arbiter of your page's reputation -- you can see the 0-9 logarithmic scale on Google's Toolbar.
In the early days of Google/PageRank, the SEO world was abuzz with talk of Google's reputation score for each website, and everyone eagerly awaited the Google update to see how the scores changed.
I stand corrected. I still think it's fair to say that the public doesn't view Google as an arbiter of a page's reputation, though as you say they are certainly aiming to be this.
I've got to disagree here. For one, Klout is a step in the direction of creating a metric to help brand marketers determine who are the most valuable people to target (i.e. "influencers"). It's not perfect but it's better than nothing from a marketing perspective.
On the other hand, if people just happen to get wrapped up in what their Klout is because they are ego-driven, then so be it.
> It's not perfect but it's better than nothing from a marketing perspective.
From some spot-checking of Klout scores of people I know, I'm not sure it's better than just a raw follow count. The number is really bizarre. For example, one of my friends who never uses Twitter, has a dozen or so tweets and 2 followers, and generally isn't active elsewhere in social media either, inexplicably has a fairly high Klout score. I'm guessing some sort of issue with normalization or small data sets.
I'm not saying there isn't value being created for marketers (though others might), I'm merely saying Klout as the go-to source for reputation on the web could have negative societal implications.
>There is something about having a private company controlling reputation on the web that's quite disturbing to many.
They don't control reputation, they control Klout Score. The degree to which people associate that with reputation is the degree to which Klout is providing (or appearing to provide) value.
And while I don't think your average HN reader places much importance in Klout scores as a measure of reputation and influence, mass media outlets are certainly starting to.
No transparency, quantity over quality, higher scores the more personal data you fork over -- this is all movement in the wrong direction.