January 16, 2008
Revealing My Eigenvector
I stumbled upon a curious new algorithm for measuring a person's digital status. It's called a QDOS, and it was developed by British company called Garlik -- which names the venerable Tim Berners-Lee among it's advisors.
The QDOS FAQ says:
Your QDOS is brought to life in your own iconic QDOS mark of 4 overlapping colours, from largest to smallest, each one representing the different dimensions of your digital status: popularity, impact, activity and individuality.
We derived it from the word ‘kudos’, meaning ‘glory, fame or renown’.
At the heart of QDOS is a powerful mathematical representation called an eigenvector which is used to calculate everyone's score for each of four dimensions - popularity, impact, activity and individuality.
I'm a sucker for a good eigenvector, so I filled in the (lengthy) list of locations where I can be found online, resulting in my QDOS of Q5881:
The immediately-noticeable purple area above represents my online activity. I'm pretty much at the max for online participation -- with the jobs I've had, that's not surprising. There are hundreds of blog posts under my name at Blog for America alone. Not to mention years worth here at Liloia.com and a few thousand Flickr photos.
The rest of the pictogram colors, green (popularity), blue (impact) and yellow (individuality) are visibly lower. I participate more in online culture than the web notices me. To that I say, relative anonymity suits me better than being the lightsaber kid or the singing beach mom any day of the week. The Internet has provided a decade worth of paychecks, so I'll just keep my head down and continue typing, thank you very much.
After you get your score, you're invited, nay... encouraged, to pit your score against known personalities. Turns out, I'm ranked above all of Manchester United as well as Pixie Geldof. As David Letterman would say during a game of "Is this Anything?" No, this is nothing.
I did come in just above Juan Carlos I. Though as the reigning king of Spain, I would imagine he doesn't keep up with his Facebook account as much as he'd like these days. And I'm oddly higher than Francis Crick. Watson, I could see -- with all of the bad press he's getting these days -- but dear old Crick? That hardly seems right. Even farther down the list is Linus Torvalds. The travesty! Surely, the man who birthed Linux has more digital whuffie than I?
Go register for the beta and don't be put off by the waiting list. The invitation arrived in minutes. Let me know if anyone ranks lower than me. That would be something.
Comments
Does anyone rank lower than you?
HELLO! Remember me? Members Only. Still typing with 2, sometimes 3, fingers.
Dad G
Kathleen Mcstay - You
Q3403
LOL