Newsflash: 300 lines of code more influential than Meryl Dorey

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Newsflash: 300 lines of code more influential than Meryl Dorey

So, I'm not sure who here knows what Klout is. Well, Klout is something that 'social media experts' like to flick themselves off about while drafting WINNING STRATEGIES. It's an automated service that calculates your relative influence on social networks based on a bunch of information such as:

your follower count (what newbie social media experts flick themselves off over while drafting WINNING STRATEGIES)
how often your content is retweeted
how often you retweet others' content
the klout scores of the people you influence
the topics you talk about

and several other metrics. It's all a bit secret-sauce really, which of course is one of its failings. The other is that it's treated as some kind of magical oracle or holy grail by people who ought to know better but don't. It's a guide that can help you roughly assess past performance. It's not magic, and it doesn't magically tell you how to do better.

Anyway, one of the things you can do with it is get a rough, 30,000ft graphical view of how any given account is performing over time. And of course, in the last couple of days I launched AthiestBot.

So you can see where I'm coming from here.

I had a look at AthiestBot's influence after a couple of days life. I got this

Oooh, 49 out of 100? Not bad for a relatively unsmart bot that's been around since 6pm Monday night.

Then I thought to myself... well, how does this go against, say... Meryl Dorey, 'erstwhile' president and chief beggar for the Alleged Vaccination Network.

Ah.

Note also, that Meryl is influential about fundraising and money. Well, it is the main thing she talks about . Never misses an opportunity to ask for cash, and has a flock of willing acolytes ready to sally forth and parrot her pronouncements.

So there it is. LOL. 300 lines of C# code (or so) and a four-table database outperforms "Australia's leading voice on vaccination". She's in big trouble when I decide to do one mocking antivaxers (there's already a very good one addressing vax and homeopathy written by my friend Nigel. Do subscribe).

Oh, incidentally, my Klout score for @drunkenmadman?