Obama Finally Beats Bieber Fever According To Klout

Thanks to a change in the way their algorithm works, Klout says that President Obama is finally more influential the Justin Bieber. The company now examines more "real world" factors such as the information in your LinkedIn profile and data from Wikipedia entries. From the article: "The overhaul, which began in January, was part of the company's effort to address critics who pointed to Bieber as a prime example of why quantifying online influence was, at best, irrelevant. The teenage pop singer, with his army of 26 million Twitter followers who retweet his every word, had a Klout score that dwarfed that of the U.S. president."

Comments

This story is bad and you should feel bad.

[icebraining]

I can understand posting important political stories. But Obama vs Bieber on Klout? Are you serious?

Klout is a terrible company, nothing more than a money machine from extending high school style popularity to the web, based on idiotic metrics and raking profiles without people's consent.

Charlie Stross called them "the Internet equivalent of herpes" and that's exactly what they are. Lets not extend their influence further.

Re:WTF

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

This is supposed to be an international site, I thought, so they should at least put his first and last name together
Just b/c they dropped this from the faq "Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. " Doesn't mean this site is all of the sudden an international site.