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Clubbing Klout with the New York Jets
We all know that Klout (an online influence measurment "service") is evil, right? Allegedly.
It's yet another online popularity contest, but where Facebook and Twitter merely rank your number of followers and "friends", Klout goes one further and attempts to identify the subject areas in which you hold sway on the Net. Do you share a lot of funny cat videos and garner dozens of Likes in the process? Do your hilarious observations about cat fur get endless Retweets +1s and lead to follows from cat magazines? Congratulations! Klout is able to detect that you are influential about Cats. You and everybody else.
I'm curious about such things so I joined up. I joined Google+ too and look where that got me.
*sound of crickets*
I really don't have anything to hide on the Internet. I don't have a great deal to hide in general, and where I do it's certainly not uploaded onto someone else's server. So the prospect of my personal data and preferences being used and abused for someone else's commercial benefit frankly doesn't upset me that much. If I get targeted advertising, what's the harm in that? So I'm happy to throw myself at the altar of Klout, but with one difference: It's For Science.
If Klout had kept its pronouncements of my influence to such predictable areas as Cats, Chocolate, Painkillers, Perth, Science and Technology, Movies etc (all of which it currently claims as mine), I would have lost interest long ago. No, what got my attention was the sudden announcement that my most broad area of influence was the American NFL team the New York Jets.
WTF?
How this happened in the first place is quite frankly a mystery to me. I figured out that I became influential about the English county of Sussex because I once tweeted (and was retweeted) about the author Lucy Sussex. A bit off the mark, but understandable in software terms. I cancelled that particular topic on the Klout site, which at least allows you to remove such things from your profile.
But the New York Jets? WTF? (it bears repeating). I don't recall cycling content about jet planes, air travel, the city or state of New York, or American football. The only *possible* link would have been a mention of the Scott Sigler book The Rookie, about modified NFL played in space by sundry aliens. It was a long time ago but that *might* have been enough to trigger a hit to the sport in general, but why this particular team I have no idea at all. A glitch in the matrix perhaps? I have taken quite a few blue pills in my day.
So I thought I'd play. I wanted to see what it would take to garner influence on Klout. I attemped to start a movement on Twitter called #botbaiting but Klout would have none of it - it seems there's a fixed topic list and I was denied the meta pleasure of becoming influential about influencing influence measurement services. (Although it was fun for a while luring and collecting real estate agents as followers only to cruelly crush them on Twitter). So, I gave in and bowed to the inevitable: the New York Jets it was.
I started tweeting about the New York Jets. I followed them. I learned things. I shared them. Sadly they're not the greatest team in the league and finished the season 8-8 and failed to make the playoffs so there are no more games until next season. Oh well, perhaps that's why I managed to become influential about them - no-one else really cares. That will make it easier if I decide to make things up, but for the time being the information I'm disseminating about them is afaik accurate.
Today I reached a milestone when one of the team official accounts (not one that I was following) started to follow me. One obliging friend logged into the Klout site and gave me a +K on the topic, which indicates that I had influenced them about this topic.
I do love the irony that I am indeed influencing a number of my Twitter followers about the New York Jets, for without my little game they'd certainly not have given the Jets the slightest thought. The vast majority are Australian, for a start. A goodly proportion of those are reasonably sport-phobic to boot. I'm messing with people's brains here, with their very lives!
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAhem
I'm curious to see where I can take this. This post is part of that process, of generating New York Jets-related content, and allowing me to branch out to toying with my Facebook friends. If you'd like to help me be ever so slightly evil, please repost, share, like and retweet wherever this comes up. If you're prepared to enter the lion's den and sully a little corner of your own internet identity for me, please go to http://klout.com/#/stephbg/topics and give me +K points for New York Jets or anything else that takes your fancy. The consequences to you are unlikely to be profound. I think.
I'm not trying to go viral here, but I do want to give some software a nudge and see what it does. Will you help me? I shall report my findings.
*eyelash flutter*
It's yet another online popularity contest, but where Facebook and Twitter merely rank your number of followers and "friends", Klout goes one further and attempts to identify the subject areas in which you hold sway on the Net. Do you share a lot of funny cat videos and garner dozens of Likes in the process? Do your hilarious observations about cat fur get endless Retweets +1s and lead to follows from cat magazines? Congratulations! Klout is able to detect that you are influential about Cats. You and everybody else.
I'm curious about such things so I joined up. I joined Google+ too and look where that got me.
*sound of crickets*
I really don't have anything to hide on the Internet. I don't have a great deal to hide in general, and where I do it's certainly not uploaded onto someone else's server. So the prospect of my personal data and preferences being used and abused for someone else's commercial benefit frankly doesn't upset me that much. If I get targeted advertising, what's the harm in that? So I'm happy to throw myself at the altar of Klout, but with one difference: It's For Science.
If Klout had kept its pronouncements of my influence to such predictable areas as Cats, Chocolate, Painkillers, Perth, Science and Technology, Movies etc (all of which it currently claims as mine), I would have lost interest long ago. No, what got my attention was the sudden announcement that my most broad area of influence was the American NFL team the New York Jets.
WTF?
How this happened in the first place is quite frankly a mystery to me. I figured out that I became influential about the English county of Sussex because I once tweeted (and was retweeted) about the author Lucy Sussex. A bit off the mark, but understandable in software terms. I cancelled that particular topic on the Klout site, which at least allows you to remove such things from your profile.
But the New York Jets? WTF? (it bears repeating). I don't recall cycling content about jet planes, air travel, the city or state of New York, or American football. The only *possible* link would have been a mention of the Scott Sigler book The Rookie, about modified NFL played in space by sundry aliens. It was a long time ago but that *might* have been enough to trigger a hit to the sport in general, but why this particular team I have no idea at all. A glitch in the matrix perhaps? I have taken quite a few blue pills in my day.
So I thought I'd play. I wanted to see what it would take to garner influence on Klout. I attemped to start a movement on Twitter called #botbaiting but Klout would have none of it - it seems there's a fixed topic list and I was denied the meta pleasure of becoming influential about influencing influence measurement services. (Although it was fun for a while luring and collecting real estate agents as followers only to cruelly crush them on Twitter). So, I gave in and bowed to the inevitable: the New York Jets it was.
I started tweeting about the New York Jets. I followed them. I learned things. I shared them. Sadly they're not the greatest team in the league and finished the season 8-8 and failed to make the playoffs so there are no more games until next season. Oh well, perhaps that's why I managed to become influential about them - no-one else really cares. That will make it easier if I decide to make things up, but for the time being the information I'm disseminating about them is afaik accurate.
Today I reached a milestone when one of the team official accounts (not one that I was following) started to follow me. One obliging friend logged into the Klout site and gave me a +K on the topic, which indicates that I had influenced them about this topic.
I do love the irony that I am indeed influencing a number of my Twitter followers about the New York Jets, for without my little game they'd certainly not have given the Jets the slightest thought. The vast majority are Australian, for a start. A goodly proportion of those are reasonably sport-phobic to boot. I'm messing with people's brains here, with their very lives!
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAhem
I'm curious to see where I can take this. This post is part of that process, of generating New York Jets-related content, and allowing me to branch out to toying with my Facebook friends. If you'd like to help me be ever so slightly evil, please repost, share, like and retweet wherever this comes up. If you're prepared to enter the lion's den and sully a little corner of your own internet identity for me, please go to http://klout.com/#/stephbg/topics and give me +K points for New York Jets or anything else that takes your fancy. The consequences to you are unlikely to be profound. I think.
I'm not trying to go viral here, but I do want to give some software a nudge and see what it does. Will you help me? I shall report my findings.
*eyelash flutter*
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