But, in seriousness, with those buttons you can see the reach of that post on each social network. It would be fairly trivial for you to verify those numbers are correct and to come to your own conclusions about whether my blog has "influence".
I'm not against badges per se - but I don't like an obfuscated way of calculating something.
Given that I know very little about Krout, perhaps you could explain why you participated in the first place. I don't wish to sound rude; I'm genuinely interested in what exactly you did, and why you thought it was worth doing.
Basically, can you expand on:
"A vaguely plausible "score" that you can use to justify your "investment" in tweeting all day long."
How come ?! This is blatantly illegal in Europe !
I genuinely really don't see how they could get passive consent unless FB and Twitter themselves give them access. Or they just scrap public profiles ?
In Europe you it's opt-in by default. You have to explicitly consent to the creation of an account as far as I understand it. So, to me, they could scrap content but not go as far as create automatically an account without your consent. Or I misunderstood something and would be glad someone explains it to me.
I don't think they create an account for you, they just compute a score based on your activity on social media accounts you already have.
So if you have a twitter account, they can generate a score for the twitter user using publicly available information and then if you sign up to klout, link these existing calculations to the newly created account.
But, in seriousness, with those buttons you can see the reach of that post on each social network. It would be fairly trivial for you to verify those numbers are correct and to come to your own conclusions about whether my blog has "influence".
I'm not against badges per se - but I don't like an obfuscated way of calculating something.