When Klout announced in mid-September that Blogger and Tumblr would play a role in determining your Klout score, WordPress users immediately asked, “What about us?”

Klout responded by quietly adding WordPress.com to its scoring system, which already factors in 11 other services: Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Google+, Instagram, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube. Unlike its integration with those services, Klout didn’t publicly reveal the WordPress.com addition, but we noticed the WordPress button on the Klout dashboard anyway.

Update: Only blogs hosted on WordPress.com were added to Klout, an Automattic rep told Mashable. Self-hosted blogs on WordPress.org aren’t included in Klout scores yet.

“People love WordPress and have put a ton of effort creating their blogs and building and influencing their audience,” Klout CEO Joe Fernandez told Mashable. “Our goal is to measure influence everywhere it occurs. [Posterous, Quora, Yelp] and and many others are on our roadmap.”

Recently, the San Francisco-based startup also released a feature that lets users gain insights on top content influencers, as well as users who have received the most +Ks for respective topics.

“The big thing historically we have not done a good job on is helping people understand their scores,” Fernandez said. “Through the rest of the year, you will see us release a series of features that really address this.”

“I often think back to doing a Google search in 2000, the results were better than anything else out there, but they have had to constantly improve to be where they are today. That’s how I think of Klout. We are taking on a huge challenge and it’s very early in the game and we have a long journey ahead of us. The key difference is when you search Google and the result you wanted comes up third instead of first you generally don’t get personally offended. With Klout, we are putting a score next to your name and if a person feels like the data there about them isn’t correct it’s understandable that they get upset.”

BONUS: What Klout’s New Topic Pages Look Like

To populate a user’s Topic Pages (see screenshots below), Klout analyzes the user’s content created across the 12 networks it calculates.


Clickable Topics on Your Dashboard


On your Klout dashboard, you can click on a topic to open its Topic Page.

Social Media Topic Page


For example, here's the social media Topic Page, which displays top influencers and top +K recipients.

Journalism Topic Page


Here's the journalism Topic page.

Top +K Recipients


You can click on "Top +K Recipients" to get a closer look at which users are snagging the most +Ks.

Best Content Stream


The "Best Content" tab will show you popular content from the past 90 days.

More About: blogging, klout, News, Social Media, social networking, WordPress

Eight years ago on this day in 2003, I started Blogging.

Here's some basic info about what has transpired in eight years here at the Six Pixels of Separation Blog: over 2700 Blog entries, over 20,000 comments and over 270 audio Podcasts. If you have read or listened to only one percent of all of that content, you'll know that both acknowledging this milestone or speaking about the numbers (how big/how many) is not my style. But, when I woke up this morning and saw the date notification in my Outlook, it gave me pause. It wasn't a sense of pride or accomplishment, either. The only question that continually popped into my brain was: was all of this Blogging worth it? And, the answer is obvious: yes.

Yes it is.

Starting this Blog was (and still is) without the question the single most important thing I have done in my professional life. It has changed me. It has changed the way I learn and grow and it has changed how I think about the world (and business and marketing and media and beyond). In spending some serious time soaking in this anniversary, I listed out why Blogging was (and still is) the smartest thing I have ever done.

8 Reasons Why Blogging Still Rules:

It's slow. I'm in no rush. Most brand are. They think that Social Media is cheap, fast and easy. Blogging has taught me that nothing could be further from the truth. In 2008, I wrote a Blog post called, In Praise Of Slow, that evolved into a much longer and important piece of my first business book, Six Pixels of Separation and the idea still rings true. Blogging has taught me the merits of building true relationships between an audience and content... and that takes time. Lots of time and effort. As fast and simple as it is to publish content with a Blog, success with a Blog as an engine of Marketing is a slow process. And, like a great cup of tea, the process is worth it if you have the intestinal fortitude to see it through.

Critical thinking. People like to think that Blogging is about the discourse (the comments, trackbacks, links, likes and tweets). While this makes up an important piece of the Blogging puzzle, the main reason I Blog is to publicly think about New Media and my media hacking ways. To be blunt: it's a selfish act. The only part that isn't selfish is that I publish it for the world to see, comment on and criticize. But (to be blunt again), that is selfish too, because everything that everyone tacks on to my Blog posts make me think more (and even rethink my initial positions). The simple act of Blogging forces me to think in a more critical way and to get that thinking down in writing. The writing part is (obviously) the hardest part of critical thinking. Putting your thoughts into words is not easy.

The people you meet. People often talk about stepping away from the computer to enjoy the conversation and meeting of people in the real world (more on that here: The Real World). My Blog has allowed me to not only meet, but become very close friends with people I would have never met otherwise. When I was a kid, I often wished that someone at my school liked comics or martial arts as much as I did. Now, we take for granted how easy it is to meet and connect with fellow, like-minded individuals. I don't take our connectivity for granted. Ever. Blogging has allowed me to meet and connect with people by removing the challenge of geography. While I don't often get to press the flesh with certain individuals often enough, I enjoy waking up and hanging out online with friends like Seth Godin, Amber Naslund, Julien Smith, Hugh McGuire, Liz Strauss, Christopher S. Penn, Mark W. Schaefer, Hugh McGuire, Tamar Weinberg, C.C. Chapman, Arjun Basu, Joseph Jaffe, Tom Peters, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and countless other (just look at my Blogroll on the left for more or who I follow on Twitter or Facebook:) I have coffee with all of these people each and every morning - whether they know it or not.

Writing (and reading) as art. This concept was really driven home to me after reading the book, Linchpin, by Seth Godin. Some people paint, some people scrapbook and others twiddle on a guitar in their basements. I write about business, marketing and media hacking. That is my art. For years, I thought it would sound either pretentious or ridiculous to say that writing about business is an art form. Well, this is my art. Take it or leave it.

Personal branding. Really, it's about reputation. It's easy to say something. It's easy to do something. It's hard to build a real reputation that is based on who you truly are for the world to see. This Blog is as real as it gets. It has been a tool, platform and space for me to demonstrate how I think. I believe the results are reflected in how Twist Image (my marketing agency that I own with my three other business partners) has grown over the years. I also believe that there is no better resume than this Blog to define me. I wish more people understood the power of having a living and breathing ongoing publishing platform that allows you to demonstrate how you think, that anyone can access from anywhere.

My place to go. I'm hooked on Arianna Huffington's line: "Self expression is the new entertainment." People often ask, "when do you find the time to Blog?" All I can think to myself is, "when do you find the time to watch half of the television shows and movies that you've watched?" By definition, I'm much more interested in active media than passive media. So, while you're relaxing and watching a sitcom, I'm relaxing and writing a Blog post. This is my place to go. My Blog is my treehouse. This is where I go for fun.

It keeps me regular. I made a commitment to publish six pieces of text-based content and one audio piece each and every week. You can use all the Metamucil you want, my Blog keeps me regular. Knowing that I am committed to creating and publishing this amount of content makes my ears perk up. It keeps me open to uncover new and interesting topics to discuss. The regularity and consistency of the Blog has forced me to keep that "nose for news" that I first developed when I started off in professional journalism during my late teens.

It connects me to you. Think about life before Blogging. You would be waiting for a new book to come out or for a published piece in a newspaper of magazine. No more. Blogging connects me to you. You don't need to read it every day and you don't even need to leave a comment, and yet it still connects us (some more than others). I Blog in the hopes my thoughts resonate. I Blog in the hopes that it creates a level of discourse. I Blog because I'm tired of "top 10 reasons"-types of Blog posts. I Blog in an attempt to raise the bar. I Blog because it connects me to people like you... the exact kind of people I have been waiting my whole life to meet.

Why do you Blog? Better yet, why don't you Blog?




Tags:

active media

amber naslund

arianna huffington

arjun basu

art

blog

blog anniversary

blogging

blogroll

business

business book

cc champan

christopher s penn

comic books

content

critical thinking

discourse

facebook

hugh mcguire

jay rosen

jeff jarvis

joseph jaffe

journalism

julien smith

linchpin

liz strauss

magazine

mark w schaefer

marketing

marketing agency

martial arts

media

media hacker

new media

newspaper

outlook

passive media

personal branding

podcast

publishing

publishing platform

reputation

seth godin

social media

tamar weinberg

tom peters

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The sun is shining bright for Tumblr today. The microblogging platform raised $85 million and was heralded as "bigger than Wikipedia." But Tumblr's explosive growth has been driven by huge quantities of porn and spam, and that seems to make the startup uncomfortable. More »

@jinadcruz Yes. Or use this bookmarklet to make it quicker It embeds the tweets as HTML hence more permanent.

Twitter and Facebook and all sorts of social media, are drawing the attention that the ‘old’ blogs once commanded. Moreover, these social networks allow people to talk directly to one another rather than in the more random method that commenting on a blog post allows; why wouldn’t you prefer to carry on a one-on-one conversation with a friend rather than hoping someone reads a comment you’ve added to a blog post, number 59 out of 159?



As much as I like reading comments on mine or any other blog, Khoi Vinh is right not only about the changed convenience but also the utility of your comments/feedback on others' opinions.

Widget for sharing your twitter favorites on your blog.

"Citizen journalism also has stabilized. Fewer than one in 10 Web users say they have created their own original news or opinion piece, according to Pew, and comment sections on blogs or mainstream media sites, which were supposed to turn the old one-way media model into a two-way street, are often too profane, hateful, or off-point to attract people. Only one in four Web users has left a comment—probably no more than wrote letters to the editor in decades past"

You have already seen this happen to some extent if you were a blogger in the past five years. People don't comment enough and if they do, all they leave behind is rants. The community feel of blogging which initially attracted everyone is probably now lost to Twitter and may move on to something else in the future. But if Wikipedia has to resort to recruiting then things are getting really bad.

"I bring my social network, ego searching, incoming news and various means of communication with me wherever I go. I pull out the phone at stop lights, when I’m waiting for groceries to be be bagged, in between steps at the ATM, in bathrooms, on walks with my son, waiting in school drive-thru lines, everywhere. And it’s not just when I’m out. When is the last time you did something creative on your computer — written a blog post or a letter, worked in Photoshop, or even read a long article — without allowing yourself to be interrupted by the realtime internet?"

Story of our lives?

"While we’ve written about some of the most exciting and important new features in WordPress 3.0 already, we thought now would be a good time to round-up some resources of how these newest features work and what WordPress designers and developers will need to consider when upgrading or creating new plugins or themes for WordPress 3.0."

"There’s a big difference between adding a feature to an existing product and building a product around a philosophy. Posterous is built around the philosophy that blogging should be a passive experience and that email is the simplest interface for posting."

"Twitter offers an easy wizard at twitter.com/goodies to help you embed Twitter lists as a widget in your web pages. You can customize the color scheme and the widget dimensions so that it blends perfectly with your site."

"This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts. You can use it, too...
But only at your own risk. Paste a tweet URL below:"

"The Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the button can display personalized content whether or not the user has logged into your site. For logged-in Facebook users, the button is personalized to highlight friends who have also liked the page."

Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.

Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.

wp-click-track is a WordPress plugin, started in January 2009, that adds automated link tracking to your posts and pages. It initially started out as a simple plugin for my own personal usage but has since evolved into a full module all its own.

Gruber has explained that he dislikes comments because they distract from his all-important voice. This is exactly the kind of egotistical statement that makes him unpopular with many people, especially other writers, but a must-read pundit. But Gruber is about to get comments, whether he likes it or not.

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

Postalicious is a WordPress plugin that automatically posts your delicious, ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit or Yahoo Pipes bookmarks to your blog. The exact details of how your bookmarks are posted are very customizable and are designed to meet your specific needs.

Content is king. The more quality content you manage the more traffic you get. There are a few methods of creating automated content that seem to be greatly over looked

For some of us, blog themes are what flower gardens were to our parents, hot rods were to our grandparents and folk cures for Spanish flu were to our great-grandparents: things we could tinker with indefinitely.

Recently moved my Wordpress blog to a tumblr account while I was removing a hosting account, wrote this script to do the transfer for me using Wordpress' Export feature and Tumblr's API.

The epic showdown. Two titans of free internet content-management will meet in this arena. Only one can emerge victorious.

For those looking to use WordPress as a tumblelogging platform, they very well can. The following reviews offer up the best and the worst (though the worst here are still pretty damn good) tumblelog themes to build on.

We may get an inordinate amount of media coverage in this country, but some numbers indicate that there are perhaps only 50,000 active bloggers in this country. So while we can generate a mighty run on the market for pink panties, by ourselves, we are powerless to vote a party to power.

RT @labnol From @neilpatel: "15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My First Blog"

India's first WordPress Camp, 21-22 Feb '09, Delhi

I'm perfectly qualified for a job -- just don't look me up online.

"I'd like to make a pitch on behalf of all hard-working bloggers out there: let's see some of that stimulus program come to those who really deserve it. Us."

My list for Blogs.com

The successful candidate will be asked to keep a blog and photo diary in exchange for six months rent-free on Hamilton Island as part of a $150,000 salary package that includes return airfares and travel insurance.

He saw the future of online publishing, and built a multi-million-dollar gossip blog empire. Then, for his next trick, Nick Denton foretold the economic meltdown. But as he sells off his prime assets – and crosses swords with a few too many of his victims – Ian Burrell asks if the Gawker kingpin can survive

How top bloggers blog. Anyone care to do something similar about desi bloggers?

Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche.

The final guide to WordPress SEO. Quite comprehensive and accurate.

A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

One of the strangest and most enthralling aspects of personal blogs is just how intensely personal they can be. I’m talking “specific details about someone’s S.T.D.’s” personal, “my infertility treatments” personal. There are nongynecologica

Manage your Ads, Control Who Sees Them

With every site you build there are going to be security risks and issues, there is no way around this, it is going to happen. All we can do is minimize the damage, be ready for it and take action. Wordpress is now the most popular Blogging Engine, this w

"Twitter started off like a confusing but fun way to keep up with what your friends or favorite bloggers were doing. Slowly more and more people started using Twitter and with that, many applications were built to accompany it. I call them courtiers. Here

A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

Putting out TechCrunch is like riding a bullet train. When I jumped aboard, it was already going 150 miles per hour.

Have your browser understand what you are blogging about and suggest pictures, links, articles and tags to make your posts more vibrant. Sounds interesting but I'll wait for it to get out of alpha.

"The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals." So much for Digg-ifying everything in sight, eh?

The purpose of the contest is to encourage original liberty-minded blogger journalism on college campuses and to identify young conservative and libertarian talent who wish to pursue careers as journalists and writers.

When it comes to reading web pages,most readers read in "F" shaped pattern taking into consideration the eye movements of 232 readers,it was found that a reader generally reads in a horizontal movement first.