53 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

Digital Tree


Have you missed any of our new digital media resources? Well, take a break from playing Angry Birds Space on your new iPad to catch up now with our weekly features roundup!

This week we’ve covered ways to improve your vacation using social media, how to protect yourself and your work on Pinterest and 10 places you’re not allowed to see on Google Maps. We also have an exclusive infographic on what’s working in digital non-profit fundraising, ways technology will transform the traditional classroom and seven reasons why you should purchase a ticket to Mashable Connect 2012 (as if there are only seven reasons!). We even poked our heads in at Aviary’s hip NYC nest.

What are you waiting for? Don’t miss your chance to benefit from these resources!


Editor’s Picks



Social Media


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Business & Marketing


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Tech & Mobile


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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, johnwoodcock.

More About: Business, COMMUNICATIONS, Features Week In Review, Social Media, Tech

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/24/53-digital-media-resources/?utm_source=feedbur...

How to Leverage Your Personality Type to Nail the Interview


Mona Abdel-Halim is the co-founder of Resunate, the makers of the Apply widget for startups. You can start attracting top talent for free by getting an Apply widget for your company at Resunate.com/employers. You can also connect with Mona and Resunate on Facebook and Twitter.

With the competition in today’s job market, you’re considered lucky if you are offered an interview.

But once you’ve made it to the interview round, there’s more to consider than just dressing the part and ensuring you remember to bring extra copies of your resume. To really nail the interview — and ultimately, get the job — you need to demonstrate to the employer why you’re the best person for the job. This can be difficult for many job seekers to do.

One way to showcase your talents is through knowing and understanding your personality type. This knowledge enables you to position your natural personality preferences as job strengths and indicators of success.

You may have taken personality assessments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® instrument before. This is a psychometric tool taken by more than 2 million people annually that sorts your natural preferences, referred by four abbreviated letters. They include:

  • Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I)
  • Sensing (S) or Intuition (N)
  • Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
  • Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

There are sixteen possible Myers-Briggs® personality types that help to illuminate your natural preferences. Knowing your personality type can help you understand the type of workplace culture where you’d be most comfortable. This can serve as a guide for the direction you should take in your career in order to be the most successful — and satisfied — on the job.


Personality Type & Your Interview Performance


Depending on your personality type and the position at hand, you can emphasize your strengths and learn how those preferences could help you at this particular organization.

For instance, if you have a preference for thinking and you’re vying for a high pressure position with a lot of decision-making, you should communicate your ability to think logically, conduct an objective analysis and consider the impacts and consequences to arrive at the best solution.

No personality type is an indicator that you won’t succeed; rather, your type indicates how naturally things come to you and how much you may be within your comfort range.

According to The Myers & Briggs Foundation, “Work environments influence how comfortable you are at your job. Someone with a preference for Introversion, for example, who is required to do a lot of detail work or think through a problem, may find it disruptive to be in an environment that is too loud or where a lot of interaction is required. When you know this about yourself, you can make arrangements to do your work in a more suitable location or at a time when there is less activity and interference.”


Personality Type & The Interviewer’s Perception of You



When it comes to communication with your interviewer, self-awareness is another vital aspect of a successful interview.

Let’s say your preference indicates extraversion, which means you are energized by interacting with people and develop ideas by discussing them with others. You might not have a problem talking about yourself, but you may end up saying things before you’ve had a chance to think them through. Once you know and understand your personality type, you can pay attention to your potential blind spots (such as responding quickly, sometimes without thinking) during the interview and ensure that you’re presenting your best, most professional self. This can also help with the elusive “likeability” factor that many hiring managers and recruiters ultimately look for in a job candidate.

Haven’t discovered your personality type yet? While you may think you know your preferences, taking a personality assessment can help you become more aware of how you prefer to work and how you’ll get along with others, which is not only valuable during a job interview but also for your career in general.

Employers will be impressed if you know and understand your personality type. It indicates to them that you are aware of yourself and, thus, more easily retained at the job. It also provides much-needed insight on yourself to highlight your strengths and explain why you’re the best person for the job. Not only is it a great way to position yourself for career advancement, but it can help you discover how to work better with co-workers and management, knowing their preferences and how they align with yours. This can ensure that if you land the job you don’t become one of the many in the workforce gainfully employed but dissatisfied with their job.

Do you know your personality type? How has it played a role in your career or job search?


Social Media Job Listings


Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, gehringj, AlexRaths.

More About: interview, job search series, personality

For more Business coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/24/how-to-leverage-your-personality-type-to-nail-...

Why Entrepreneurs Should NOT Buy Homes

house1

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and FAQ MEYou can follow him @jaltucher.

Many people have said to me in the past few months, “I’m going to buy a home.” Or, “What do you think of the idea of me buying a home?” Everyone thinks: Well the housing crisis is now over so I should buy a home. They think: It’s probably a good investment. They think: Time to put down “roots”. 

I’ve owned a home. A couple of times. I bought a home once after I sold a business. I then lost that home. I then went almost completely insane trying to sell it. Two things: If you are about to do a startup or if you are in the middle of startup-phase then you definitely can’t afford to waste the time or money to buy a house for reasons I explain below. Second, when you sell your startup — everyone wants to buy a house with the proceeds. Don’t. It’s just part of the American mythology. You know the myth: the white picket fence, the yard, the pool, the walls that you can paint, the keeping up with the Jones family. Just don’t. You’ll go broke. At least, if you are as stupid as me. I might be dumber than most though.

The other story I have of owning a home is still too personal. It’s filled with about as much pain as I can fit onto a page. Oh, I have a third one also from when I was growing up. But I don’t want to upset anyone in my family so I’ll leave it out. Oh, I have a fourth story that I just forgot about until this very second. But enough about me. Let’s get right to it.

There are many reasons to not buy a home: [By the way, I also put this in the category of Advice I want to tell my daughters, including my other article: 10 reasons not to send your kids to college.]

Financial:

A)     Cash Gone. You have to write a big fat check for a down payment. “But its an investment,” you might say to me. Historically this isn’t true. According to Robert Shiller from Yale, in Irrational Exuberance, 2nd edition, inflation-adjusted housing returned 0.4% from 1890 – 2004. And that’s just housing prices. It forgets all the other stuff I’m going to mention below. Suffice to say, when you write that check, you’re never going to see that money again. Because even when you sell the house later you’re just going to take that money and put it into another down payment. So if you buy a $400,000 home, just say goodbye to $100,000 that you worked hard for. You can put a little sign on the front lawn: “$100,000 R.I.P.”

(you might as well set this cash on fire)

Much better for an entrepreneur is to invest in yourself. Take 1/20th of the down payment amount. Start a business. Your investment might go to zero (which it might also do with a house) but it might also go up 10,000%. Eventually, as an entrepreneur, if you are persistent enough, you will get one of those 10,000% returns. And you will be able to be persistent because you didn’t waste all the money and time that a house would’ve cost you.

B)      Closing costs. I forget what they were the last two times I bought a house. But it was about another 2-3% out the window.  Lawyers, title insurance, moving costs, antidepressant medicine, therapy. It adds up. Two- to three-percent. Do you like flushing your money down the toilet? But, people say: isn’t that what you are doing with rent money? Absolutely not. See below.

C)      Maintenance. No matter what, you’re going to fix things. Lots of things. In the lifespan of your house, everything is going to break. Thrice. Get down on your hands and knees and fix it! And then open up your checkbook again. Spend some more money. I rent. My dishwasher doesn’t work. I call the landlord and he fixes it. Or I buy a new one and deduct it from my rent. And some guy from Sears comes and installs it. I do nothing. The Sears repairman and my landlord work for me.

When you are an entrepreneur, two things: A) you need every last dime for your business. Not for your dishwasher. And B) you need every last second for your business. Not for your dishwasher.

D)     Taxes. There’s this myth that you can deduct mortgage payment interest from your taxes. Whatever. That’s a microscopic dot on your tax returns. And guess what, that whole thing about how rent will go up with inflation? Well your property taxes will go up even faster than inflation. So you lose.

E)      You’re trapped. Let’s spell out very clearly why the myth of home ownership became religion in the United States. It’s because corporations didn’t want their employees to have many job choices. So they encouraged them to own homes. So they can’t move away and get new jobs. Job salaries is a function of supply and demand. If you can’t move, then your supply of jobs is low. You can’t argue the reverse, since new adults are always competing with you. That’s one reason for the myth. The other reason is that we have a 15 trillion dollar mortgage industry. That’s a lot of money vested on you believing that owning a home is “the right thing to do”.

And, the benefits of being an entrepreneur is that all choices are open to you. Mobility is not just an option, it’s often a necessity. You aren’t tied down to one factory. The world is your opportunity.

F)      Ugly. Saying “my house is an investment” forgets the fact that a house has all the qualities of the ugliest type of investment:

  1. Illiquidity. You can’t cash out whenever you want.
  2. High leverage. You have to borrow a lot of money in most cases.
  3. No diversification. For most people, a house is by far the largest part of their portfolio and greatly exceeds the 10% of net worth that any other investment should be.

Investing in yourself is also illiquid. But it involves less money, and allows you more choice. So do that instead.

Personal reasons to not own a house.

A)     Trapped, part 2. Some people like to have roots. But I like things to change every once in a while. Starting March, 2009 I was renting an apartment directly across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. It was fun. I’d look out the window and see Wall Street. How exciting! Before that I lived in The Chelsea Hotel with Chubb Rock. Last year we decided to relax and move a little north. Now I look out the window and see the Hudson River. And it’s quiet and I can walk along the river in the morning with no noise. It took us two weeks to pick a place and move. No hassles. I like to live a hassle-free life.

I’m constantly involved in other activities that I care about and love. What do I want the hassle of owning a home for? What if, god forbid, I want to focus on my next start-up?

(click image for my favorite Chubb Rock video)

B)      Walls. You can’t change the walls when you rent. A lot of people seem to want to tear down walls. Or paint them. Sometimes when you rent you can’t do these things. Well, make sure you have a landlord that lets you tear down walls. There must be some ancient evolutionary tic that makes us want to tear down walls or put nails in them or paint them. I don’t get it. I like the walls to stay right where they are.

C)      Rent. People will argue that the price of the mortgage, maintenance taxes, etc is all baked into the price of rent. Sometimes this is true. But usually not. And often maintenance and taxes will go up faster than your rent.

D)     Psychology. Look at your personal reasons for wanting to own. Do you feel like you can’t accomplish something in life until you own a house? Do you feel like its part of getting married and “Settling down”, i.e. creating a nest for your future children? For you, is it a part of becoming an adult. Is this what your parents taught you? Examine the real reasons you want to own and make sure they are coming from a good spot in your heart.

E)      Your time. Do you really want to spend all that time working on your house? Is this where your time is best spent towards creating a happy and fulfilled life for yourself?

F)      Choices. I feel when I rent I always have the choice to leave. To live wherever  in the world I want whenever I want. Adventure becomes a possibility even if I never take advantage of it.

G)     Stress. For me (not for everyone) owning a home equals stress. I saw what my parents went through at their worst moments owning a home. I saw what I and others went through in the Internet bust when I first owned a home. I saw what people went through in 2008. People were killing themselves. I don’t like that sort of stress. This is how I deal with stress.

H)     Cash is king. I like cash in the bank. I like having access to it.  I don’t like it all tied up in one illiquid investment. I want to fill a bathtub with all the dollar bills I would’ve used as a down payment on a house. I want to bathe in that bathtub. I’m going to do that later today in fact.

By the way, this is going to sound like a contradiction: but I think housing is a great investment right now. I think housing prices have gone down far enough and I can list the reasons why housing as an abstract investment concept is going to go higher from here. Suffice to say there are many stocks/REITs you can buy, with leverage if you want to take advantage of the rise in housing. But those are liquid investments. You can get your money back.

There’s also probably many companies you can build where you will get 10,000% returns where you can take advantage of the rise in housing that is about to occur.

But I’m never going to buy a home again. And sit there in the middle of the night thinking, “Why the hell did I do this to myself again?”


from TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/entrepreneurs-should-not-buy-homes/?utm_sour...

Researchers Say Memories Can Be Relived, Not Just Recalled [VIDEO]

Have you ever wanted to relive one of your most treasured memories? Not just think about the memory, but actually relive it? According to new research coming out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you can.

Neuroscientists at MIT have discovered that memories are physical and can be reactivated. This means that instead of just recalling a memory, scientists can now help you reconstruct them artificially by activating certain parts of your brain.

This reactivation theory isn’t new — it was just never proved before now. In an early 1900s experiment on epilepsy patients, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found that if he stimulated certain parts of the hippocampus — the part of the brain in charge of short and long-term memories — some of his patients would vividly recall past events.

Neuroscientists at MIT were able to test Penfield’s experiment further and prove his findings in a study conducted on lab mice. For this study, scientists first found the cells that became activated while a lab mouse was learning something. Then, they determined the genes that activated those cells. Finally, they paired those genes with another gene for a light-activated protein. After setting up this technique, the scientists were able to shine tiny pulses of light onto those neurons to activate the protein.

This process allowed the scientists to actually recreate the memory — artificially, that is.

As Steve Ramirez, co-author of the study, put it, “We wanted to artificially activate a memory without the usual required sensory experience, which provides experimental evidence that. . .even ephemeral phenomena, such as personal memories, reside in the physical machinery of the brain.”

Scientific jargon aside, this basically allows scientists to use light to replay moments in your mind.

Scientists are hopeful this technique could help in studying brain disorders. “The more we know about the moving pieces that make up our brains,” Ramirez says, “the better equipped we are to figure out what happens when brain pieces break down.”

What do you think of this new research? Would you like to relive a memory? Let us know in the comments.

More About: research, Science

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/24/researchers-memories-physical/?utm_source=feed...

How TwitchTV Built a Vibrant Community Around Game Streaming


If you’re ditching cable, there are many alternative content destinations online. If you’re a gamer, one of those is probably TwitchTV.

TwitchTV was started in June 2011 by Justin.tv founders Justin Kan and Emmett Shear. Since launch, TwitchTV has built an audience of 16 million visitors per month, with a growth rate of about 11% per month, according to Kan. Not only that, but those on the site stay and watch for an average of 47 minutes.

What are they watching? Usually, live broadcasts of gamers playing Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, or competitive esports like StarCraft 2, Halo and Street Fighter X Tekken.

Kan compares the rise in e-sport popularity to the rise of poker 20 years ago. While poker was a game many had enjoyed at home for years, the advent of cameras that could display the players’ hands to the television audience turned it into a spectator sport. Similarly, gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry, and now the technology is allowing people to stream their own content and spectate more easily.

“Poker started to be shown on ESPN. We are the ESPN of e-sports,” Kan said.

“Don’t wait for someone to represent you. Start your own stream and get involved.”

TwitchTV differs from ESPN in that anyone with the right tools can stream their own content. Marcus Graham, better known as djWHEAT, has been streaming games to spectators for the last 10 years. He said TwitchTV has seen a rise in the number people of streaming games, from double-digits to an individual streamer with thousands of watchers. Not only that, he says gamers are learning they can make money from their streams — sometimes enough to supplant a full-time job.

SEE ALSO: Move Over, Super Bowl. Spectator Gaming Reaches Millions Online

TwitchTV helps users monetize by allowing them to place ads in their streams. Kan said the advertising system was unique because streamers could place as many ads as they wanted in places that made sense with the content.

“I’m excited to be the ultimate level of tech entrepreneur. I set my own schedule and create my own content,” Graham said. “Now so many other people realize they can do this, too.”

Graham said TwitchTV is working on tools that will make it even easier for gamers to share their content, and he hopes that the next-generation consoles will feature tools making it easier to stream games. It’s not only about the tools though; gamers running streams have to learn how to entertain, engage and capture a loyal audience.

TwitchTV offers its streamers tools to interact with their audience, most importantly a chat that runs on the right side of their stream. It’s the main way for the streaming audience to interact with what’s being broadcast, and with each other. Graham said people come into his chats to talk to each other as well as to be entertained. He also sees people drop in even if he’s not broadcasting just to chat about games.

He also said some popular content creators are allowing their TwitchTV subscribers to play matches against them on the stream.

“It’d be like if you were a huge basketball fan and got to play a game against Michael Jordan.”

Jared Rea, the community manager for TwitchTV, said interactions the players and audience have with each other are what allow the community to grow as a whole, even as they host such a varied amount of game content.

“Almost like San Francisco’s culture and community varies from block to block, TwitchTV’s community varies wildly,” said Rea. “All the jokes in the fighting community are very different than the Minecraft community. But if you hang around, you’ll start to see a lot of familiar faces across communities.”

Rea’s job at TwitchTV, along with a whole community team, is to address and balance all the needs of this microcosm, as well as to surface the best content from each of them to feature on the main site.

“There’s a big push and pull sometimes between the casual and hardcore gamers, but at the end of the day I try to know as much about everything. I fight for the users,” said Rea, who is also a former game journalist and has been involved with the gaming culture for years.

TwitchTV’s explosive growth can be attributed to the strong community and the democratization of content creation — it gives gamers a place to belong, said Rea. He said the common gamer mentality has always felt a little out of the mainstream.

“Don’t wait for someone to represent you. Start your own stream and get involved,” he said.

The user empowerment has helped TwitchTV expand rapidly. Graham called the growth “astronomical,” and he doesn’t think it will be long before TwitchTV becomes more mainstream.

“I don’t even have to hope too hard in some cases,” he said. “The numbers are attracting eyeballs that weren’t looking at us before.”

Some of those eyeballs are big commercial advertisers, said Kan. He said more brands than before are sponsoring shows and players, and there is an emergence of big networks like Major League Gaming.

Even with the rapid growth, Rea said those interested in becoming part of the TwitchTV community will find it welcoming.

More About: esports, features, Gaming, streaming, TWITCH, twitchtv

For more Entertainment coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/20/twitchtv-gaming-community/?utm_source=feedburn...

Todd Park Appointed Second U.S. CTO

redletterdave writes "On Friday, President Barack Obama appointed Todd Park, a 39-year-old former entrepreneur and data scientist, to be the new Chief Technology Officer of the United States. Park takes over for Aneesh Chopra, the first U.S. CTO, who resigned earlier this year. Park was formerly the CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services since 2009, where he helped bring 'big data' to healthcare by helping create an open health care data platform similar to the National Weather Service, which could feed data to commercial websites and applications. Before joining the Obama administration, Park helped co-found AthenaHealth and Castlight Health, and also served as a senior adviser to Ashoka, a global incubator for social entrepreneurs. One of his ventures, Healthpoint Services, won the 2011 Sankalp Award for the 'most innovative and promising health-oriented social enterprise in India.'"

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from Slashdot http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/03/09/2113255/todd-park-appointed-second-us...

Tweet seats deserve to be booed out of the theater

Marketers, when they hit, can identify the seed of a product, service or organization and plant it in fertile soil where it will grow like mad. They can tease out the implications of the object they're charged with publicizing or find the motif that others are most likely to riff on. But when they fail, they can fail in the most mortifying fashion. All around the country, the marketing staff at theaters big and small are embracing the "youthquake" in the grooviest way I've seen in years. They are offering up "tweet seats" to the kids.

It is an operatically stupid idea.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/tweet-seats-deserved-to-be-booed-...

Social TV Fans Cheer ‘American Idol’ Singer’s Antics During Judge’s Harsh Critique


The funnyman on this season’s American Idol took his antics to another level Wednesday night, boosting his appeal among users of Peel’s Idol Interactive Experience, a second-screen engagement platform that lets viewers “cheer” or “boo” contestants and judges in real time.

TV discovery app Peel‘s data (see graphic above) of last night’s top 11 performances reveals which singers are most likely to be safe or be eliminated during tonight’s results show.

Finalist Heejun Han, who was at the bottom of the pack in last week’s chart, catapulted himself near the top of the sentiment heap with his playful rendition of Billy Joel’s “My Life.”

Han lead his performance (watch below) with a staged false start, telling the pianist and band to speed things up after the accompaniment started off too slow for his liking. Han proceeded to rip off his bland tuxedo in favor of a colorful get-up. Fans had mixed reviews (see second graphic) throughout his live performance, but they “cheered” for him intensely while the judges gave their critiques.

“Are you happy that you took the piss out of that song?” judge Steven Tyler asked Han. “The music business will kick your ass. At some point, you’ve got to take it a little more serious.”

Peels users simultaneously “booed” the judges’ commentary of Han, whose antics in previous rounds were praised by fans.

The remaining 11 contestants tackled Billy Joel songs with help from guest mentor Diddy. Leading the overall chorus of boos were underwhelming performances from DeAndre Brackensick, Erika Van Pelt and Joshua Ledet.

Could Peel users’ boos predict who’s going home? It’s possible. Last week, one of the bottom three most-booed contestants was voted off by America.

Front-runners Jessica Sanchez, Phillip Phillips and Colton Dixon continue to please Peel users, with Dixon coming out on top this week for his version of “Piano Man.”

“As for the judges, the Peel community again disagreed strongly with Jennifer Lopez, who received the most boos of the three judges and the lowest approval rating,” Peel’s VP of marketing Scott Ellis told Mashable. “But in a surprising turn, Steven Tyler was the judge most in-tune with Peel users last night, with a 73% approval rating.”

More About: american idol, apps, Entertainment, mobile apps, Music, second screen apps, Social Media, social tv, TV

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/22/american-idol-heejun-my-life-social-buzz/?utm_...

Klout Doesn’t Really Measure Influence [STUDY]

Self Confident Guy


A new study about digital influence says Klout and other social media measurement tools don’t really define how users influence their networks.

All too commonly, sites like Klout and PeerIndex claim to measure influence — and maybe they do measure influence. But what does digital influence really mean?

Brian Solis, author of The Altimeter Group report, says social websites that rank users’ social media influence don’t measure influence like they claim to do. Rather, Solis says a user’s social media score measures the “capacity to influence.”

“Scores can be measures of social capital, but not true influence,” he said.

Solis came up with his own definition of digital influence: “the ability to cause effect, change behavior, and drive measurable outcomes online.” Solis conducted qualitative research by interviewing vendors, conducting software demos, and reviewing brands with piloted digital influence programs.

He also says brands don’t really understand influence.

“While these tools use sophisticated algorithms to calculate a corresponding number, they do not take into account all of the complexities of influence and the nature of relationships between people in social networks,” Solis says. “As a result, brands are potentially misallocating precious resources based on the lack of understanding of what influence is and the role influencers play within customer markets.”

Klout said it was well aware of Solis’s report before it was published — the company even had an advanced copy. But Lynn Fox, Klout’s spokeswoman, would not say whether Klout agreed or disagreed with the report.

“The report reinforces that we came in early on and we are furthest along in the process of measuring influence in this market,” Fox said.

How Klout Found Success by Focusing on Users

The 33-page report outlines the three pillars of influence, which is the ways brands become influencers, Solis said. The pillars — reach, resonance and relevance — determine how a brand or person can cause change or effect in their social network. A social media score alone does not mean a brand is an influencer, he said.

“The Pillars of Influence contribute to social capital, which indicates the likelihood to influence behavior, but a “score” does not predict the resulting actions or outcomes,” Solis said. “A score of 74 only represents the capacity to influence, but other variable come into play as defined by the Pillars of Influence.”

Azeem Azhar, the CEO of UK-based social media influence ranking site of PeerIndex, said the study is a great conversation driver, but the conclusion of the study doesn’t mean much. Social media rating sites are all in the realm of influence and the rankings branded as measured influence aren’t misleading users, Azhar said.

“We are in a semantic battle here rather than a practical battle,” Azhar said. “I don’t think there’s much difference between the capacity to influence and influence itself.”

He illustrated this with an anecdote about martinis. If a person drank martinis the past 10 Friday nights, it’s likely the person will drink a martini the next Friday night, he said.

“Or we can say it’s likely you have the capacity to drink a martini,” Azhar said. “I don’t see a difference.”

Klout openly says on the site has an algorithm to measure influence. The algorithm has come under scrutiny in the past, but Klout says its scientists and engineers work to make sure your influence score is accurate.

“Influence in general is a challenge to define, but the point is that the data exists and influence is the ability to drive action,” she said. “Our focus right now is continuing to unlock influence for consumers.”

Does this report uncover the limitations of a social media score, or is this a semantic battle? Are the three social media pillars needed to be a digital influencer? Tell us in the comments.

Photo courtesy of iPhoto, AlijaAlija

More About: klout, Social Media

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/03/23/klout-influence/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_med...