[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.