Colin Walker

"Geoff, Social influence scoring is a real bug bear of mine and I maintain that an external agency is not capable of accurately measuring it due to only having public data. The data host would be in the best position (be it Google, Twitter, FB etc.) as they can monitor both private and public activity as well as accurately measure additional factors like click-throughs to help determine who is driving traffic rather than "soft influence" of just likes and +1s. I wrote a proposal/essay a while back called the 3 R's of Influence which states that influence is a composite of reach, reputation and relevance. The current activity model is ridiculous and does not give any true indication. Relevance is a big issue, as you state, and I defined it as trust + interest + location + platform. Timing is obviously a major factor. Identity and context also plays a part. Who are we and why are we influential? Currently we are graded the same regardless of whether we are a content creator or curator -..." - Colin Walker

"Jon, as you know, I've been wrestling with this myself and am going a "digital diet" (rather than a full detox). I think being digital is unavoidable but it's a question of balance and focus. I took my first step yesterday by unfollowing/unliking anyone/anything that isn't family or friends on Facebook. I am going to use it solely as an extension of offline life and use it as a "safe haven" from the geek side of the social web." - Colin Walker

"Since then, I have imagine that the Event Pages could take over from this kind of scenario." - Colin Walker

"This is why I suggested (March last year) that specific topics could be housed in "channels". I called it "Going Beyond the Hashtag" where you could use another format to denote a tweet should be part of a conversation or channel and, therefore, not show in the main feed. I suggested hashcode #topic# My idea was that they could be created on the fly or registered by brand/conferences etc. (in this case the brand could control it and pay to have it treated like a brand page). I thought that they could show as an additional tab in the Twitter UI (very much like a search result) when you first click on a code or make a tweet containing one. Any tweet made on that tab would automatically be marked with the hashcode or you could tweet outside and include the code. Any tweet that included the code would appear in the channel or on the users profile but NOT in the main feed so as to reduce the noise for those not participating. I thought it was quite a good idea at the time and even pitched..." - Colin Walker

"I've been considering it now that there is a, much needed, monthly option - even though you end up paying more in total." - Colin Walker

"Re-adding this as it appears to have gone missing: This is very similar thinking to the post I wrote yesterday. I have said for a while that influence cannot be accurately measured externally to a service and that the host (FB, Twitter, Google, etc.) is best placed to calculate that due to (theoretically) having access to all data. This, however, means that any influence score or rating will be "service specific" - perhaps that's not such a bad thing. Trying to use one score to rate out influence across the entire social web is crazy. We all know that follower numbers is a rubbish stat. Klout tries to negate to negate its effect by actually measuring the ratio of engagement to followers to see what fraction of your audience is actually interacting with you. It's part of the way there but not entirely so. If 40% of users on Twitter only consume then that's a lot of "engagement" unaccounted for - no replies, no retweets, no favourites. Wrapping everything in t.co addresses, however,..." - Colin Walker

"Thanks for the link." - Colin Walker