Klout reveals new scoring system

DAILY DOT COM - Think you're a pretty big deal on the internet?  If you ever wanted to check your "clout" there's actually a site that measures that kind of stuff and coincidentally, it's called Klout .

Klout first launched in 2008 and is seen as one of the best-known measures of online influence out there.  Yet despite its perks, the website has long been a magnet for criticism for how it calculates scores.

Klout's ranking system scored social media users based on their activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter and tagged them with numbers between 1 and 100.  However, a lot of critics complained the system wasn't accurate and lacked transparency.

Monday, co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez announced that significant changes were being rolled out.  The process reportedly started in January.  “Our team of engineers, scientists and hardcore social media users are obsessed with providing every person with the most accurate and transparent view of their influence and power their ideas,” said Fernandez.

100 million people have Klout.  Users were notified of the upgrades via email.

So what's new?  Klout changed the way it ranks people by pulling in more real-time data from sources like LinkedIn and Wikipedia.  The site itself was also redesigned to become more useful as an online cheat sheet to what your contacts are up to online.

Even with the changes, I noticed my score stayed about the same.  But the leader of the free world now has the top score. That’s right President Obama moved up, to a near perfect 99 score, while teen singing sensation Justin Beiber dropped to 92.   Incidentally, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has a score of 90.