[vrish88]

Klout is really just an arbitrary reputation ranking system, just like the Bartonphink system. However the difference lies in what people conclude from an individual's ranking. People use Bartonphink to rank someone on their pertinence to bartonfink. People use Klout to "measure someone's online influence". This is extraordinarily important to businesses looking to do marketing, sales, customer service, etc.

The point I think you are missing is that Klout, and other ranking systems, can give a quick and objective assessment of someone's value or ability in a certain area.

Here's a list of ranking systems and what they indicate:

Klout -> online influence StackOverflow -> programming expertise FourSquare -> loyalty to a business Credit Score -> fiscal responsibility HackerNews Karma -> ability to provide interesting and pertinent points of conversation

[bartonfink]

I understand that, Vrish - and I agree. My point isn't with Klout specifically, but rather the author's explicit assumption that I would even care about it and that if I don't I'm in some sort of online minority.

My "online influence" has zero effect on my professional or personal life, and I suspect the same is true for many other software engineers. That's the point I was making, and the author's first erroneous sentence is roughly where I stopped reading what he had to say.

[vrish88]

I disagree, for software engineers it is becoming more important to have a greater online influence. Employers are looking more and more at how involved people are in open source projects (eg. github profiles).

People with blogs and StackOverflow profiles public expose how much they actually know about software development. Then when they have a greater following or more points that is a validation that what are saying is accurate.