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Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

Klout revealed a beta version of its new topic pages today, which it hopes will turn the company into something more like a Nielsen-type rating service rather than a vanity metric for people using social media.

The pages are Klout's way of scanning the Web looking for influential discussions and the people who are leading those discussions.

When you think of Twitter and influence, you might think that the most obvious metric used to measure would be the number of followers a user has. Time and again, influence on Twitter has been shown to be not a direct function of how many followers one has, but a number of other factors.

One of those factors, according to a report by HP, may be just as obvious as follower numbers: long-standing status as a source of information and news. Having millions upon millions of followers may be fun, but it doesn't set the Trending Topics.

In the year and a half since Klout launched at SxSW 2009, the company has grown to become the leading social network influencer measurement within the online communications space. With success has come criticism within the public relations and advertising sector. This criticism of the algorithm-driven influence measurement ranges from its Twitter-heavy measurement of people's participation to the ethics of its Perks program.

Klout CEO and co-founder Joe Fernandez conducted an open interview on Tuesday that included a dozen communications bloggers and influencers to discuss these criticisms. The call revealed a corporate culture that actively weighs and debates the merits and ethics of influence. Here are four ways Klout is looking at its challenges and how it may evolve:

Although Klout describes itself as "the standard for influence," the startup has focused its measurements thus far on assessing people's Twitter influence. But today, Klout has added another measurement to the mix, giving users the ability to gauge their Facebook influence.

As Ash Rust, Ranking Director at Klout, noted in the company's blog post announcing today's change, sharing and interaction on Facebook is different than that on Twitter. While Twitter influence can be see by the amount of interest and engagement from tweets (and retweets), Facebook users "post many different types of content, view multiple streams and interact with their friends in more complex ways."

Last week the New York Historical Society opened the first large-scale exhibit of material from the Grateful Dead Archive. The archive will be managed by the University of Santa Cruz with special access to four decades worth of videotapes, recordings, fan letters and even a note from President Obama. What is surprising about the archives and the band itself, is that this classic group of rock icons is being touted as one of the first businesses to take an active role in viral marketing and brand influence building.

In an email sent to users today and in today's blog post, SocialToo CEO, Jesse Stay, announced that users would no longer be receiving nightly Twitter autofollow and unfollow stat emails on the company's dime. Email from SocialToo now costs $20.

This comes in the wake of a "no guarantees" policy toward accuracy or speed for Twitter users with more than 2,000 followers and general claims of delays, issues, and inaccuracies. Do we smell inadequate infrastructure?

While Twitter has been less than forthcoming on how they plan to monetize their service, there is no shortage of ideas from third parties on ways to get paid for spending time with Twitter. From pay-to-tweet to selling off the real estate on your Twitter background, there are any number of ways you could be making money off the service.

Now, there's another service that - much like RSS-based advertising - offers to pay you for advertisements that run in the midst of your tweet stream. Meet Magpie, an ad network for Twitter.