Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
I killed my Klout account yesterday, reasoning that a reliance on bad data is worse than a reliance on no data whatsoever. And today I saw this article from David Armano documenting the league-table list of "influencers" at a recent conference produced by a market analysis company called Radian 6. My challenge to this is twofold: first, what value is created by producing rankings of people involved at a conference? And second, what is the legitimacy of the basis for these rankings? Armano's connects suggest how easily they the data can be skewed: "My presentation was full of short, sticky phrases and frameworks—designed for tweets and social note taking. This is no accident—I would not be worth my weight as a communicator if I were not able to break down communications into memorable bits worth sharing." The tools that do the measurements begin to shape the messages they measure - and not for the better.

Today: 6 Total: 8 [Direct link]

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 06:19 a.m.

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