Social network measurement serviceKlouthas unveiled a new metric to better calculate its users’ overall social reach, adding Foursquare checkins alongside its existing Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn metrics. Klout measures social influence by using data collected from supported social media accounts, incorporating following counts, follower counts, retweets, list memberships and the influential people that interact with those accounts – combining them all to award the user with an overall social “Klout” score....

It was only five days ago thatGoogle+ launched the first part of its application programming interface. The available API was launched just beforeGoogle+ finally opened itself to the publicfollowing its 90 day beta testing period, no doubt to get developers started in the right direction and prepped for the more robust API in Google+’s future. In the five days after Google+’s API launch, Klout actively worked on using the available data to integrate G+’s service onto its own platform....

I was able to sit down with thePeoplebrowsr teamthis week to get a sneak peek of a new service by the company called “Kred“. They shared a quote with us. Time Magazine says: Influence is impossible to measure. Kred is most certainly an instant competitor toKlout, who calls its service the “Standard of Influence”. Peoplebrowsr wants to calculate influence in a different way, in a community way and transparently. Peoplebrowsr’s CEO, Jodee Rich, told me that the company started thinking about how influence was being calculated online about a year ago....

Klouttoday announcedin a blog postthat it has introduced a new feature to the service called +K. +K is a button that allows you to vouch for your friends’ influence on certain topics that they discuss via their social media accounts. According to Klout, a +K should be awarded when that peer has recently influenced you personally on a given topic, verifying Klout’s determinations that it bases on data collection and algorithms....

As connection speeds increase and the ubiquity of the Internet pervades, digital content reigns. And in this era, free education has never been so accessible. The Web gives lifelong learners the tools to become autodidacts,eschewing exorbitant tuition and joining the ranks of other self-taught great thinkers in history such as Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen and Ernest Hemingway. The world’s encyclopedia is as weightless, free and instantly accessible as Wikipedia, which is quicklygaining legitimacyin the education sphere....