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.

Community managers who don't have their own custom-made evaluation systems will love this, because it provides them an easy-to-use social ranking system in plug-n-play format. Once the beta is released, it will show up in the interface as another feature in the menu list.

The site owner or manager can use a preferences list to calibrate from "most important" to "least important" the weight that each of a certain type of interaction has on the network or the blog.

Then, he can create custom titles for each of those qualifications and assign them to users. At Fred Wilson's blog, AVC, for example, Wilson is going with a bar theme and assigning himself the title of bartender. He assigns different types of users other titles, like regular, or semi-regular, depending on how often they visit the site and how often they leave a comment.

The new features would be an improvement over straight-up commenting, especially since social search and discovery seems to be a huge trend developing Web communities. It's no longer enough for a site manager or a publisher to make commenting available to build the community. The new move seems to be towards being able to identify experts within the blog or the network.

Screenshot comes from Fred Wilson's AVC blog

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

"This is a big step for us in turning Klout into more of a utility around search and discover," says CEO Joe Fernandez. "This is a really early version of where we plan to take this but it speaks to our belief that every person who creates content has influence. Our goal is just to understand what they are influential about and who they influence."

Klout uses its +K data - the measure of how influential a person is in social media - to show who in a person's audience is voting them as influential about a particular topic.

The topic pages look a lot like the Klout interface and it's really simple to just scan down a page after searching for a general topic. You can immediately find someone of influence. Then, Klout shows what content influencers on each specific topic are talking about.

Klout influence is more than just a single person's focus on a single subject. It's feasible now that someone can rank high in Klout in any manner of subjects, not just in the previous silos assigned to Klout users.

The aim is to provide more context about a topic. Klout says in a blog post today that they plan to add further analytics, trends and related content over the coming months.

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.

According to Bernardo Huberman, director of HP Lab's Social Computing Research Group, it isn't the "most prolific tweeters or those with most followers" as you might expect.

"We found that mainstream media play a role in most trending topics and actually act as feeders of these trends," said Huberman. "Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases."

According to Huberman's report, there are 22 Twitter users who dominate the Twitter Trending Topics. Bauley describes a bit of the work behind the report and its findings:

The HP team collected data from Twitter's own search API over a period of 40 days in the fall of 2010.  From the resulting sample of 16.32 million tweets, they identified 22 users who were the source of the most retweets when a topic was "trending."  Of those 22, 72% were Twitter streams run by mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the New York Times, El Pais and theBBC.

Although popular, most of these sites have millions of followers fewer than highly followed tweeters such as Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama or Lady Gaga.

Similarly, the research showed that just having an active Twitter account was not a factor in creating a trend.

What were these 22 accounts? Take a look.

For the intellectually curious, the report is embedded blow in its entirety.

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:

When Klout launched it used Twitter data only, creating a metric that was over-reliant on one network. In recent months the service has added LinkedIn and Facebook analysis to its analysis of an individual's influence capability.

"We do plan on tying in with the content systems," said Fernandez. "We want to move beyond just ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch, and focus on individual writers. Conglomerate blogs are pools of voices, they are media properties. How do we break the author's influence away from masthead?"

By weighing a diverse set of data points, Klout is likely to bulwark itself against criticism about the algorithm's validity. Past measures like Technorati and Twitter-specific solutions have suffered because of their inability to weigh multiple sets of data. Other measures - particularly those of blogs - that use multiple weights, such as PostRank and indexes like the AdAge 150, have survived criticism because they weigh diverse data points to counterbalance inconsistencies.

Build Volatility Into the Metric

Another strong criticism of Klout remains the appearance of influential relationships in one's profile that may or may not be relevant anymore. Klout currently values long-term relationships over zeitgeist events, such as someone who garners sudden influence due to a particular issue or event. In the past, networks like Technorati and Digg have tinkered with their algorithm to de-weight long-term relationships and influence, which in turn have met significant criticism and even lower usage.

Klout wants to infuse more volatility into the algorithm to account for changes. The start-up is actively looking at how social data is created with more ease each day, and how data analysis can scale with it. Part of the timeliness challenge facing Klout is keeping the system fun and interactive for people to want to increase their Klout score while preventing gaming of the algorithm, which both Digg and Google search have had to combat.

"It's important to build the algorithm so that it can't be gamed," said Fernandez. "It has to be volatile enough that it can't be moved. You want the score to be responsive to real life, but you want to avoid intentional gaming like retweet networks. We have scientists that spend the whole day thinking about all of the loopholes. We are going to have to live with (a constant battle against) the overall gaming."

The encouraging aspect of the algorithm volatility issue is Klout's adherence to the past. It does not want to repeat the mistakes of past algorithms, and actively looks at what has worked, too. Only time will tell if the company is successful, but it's not operating in a vacuum.

The Warren Buffet Problem

If one were to type Warren Buffet's profile into Klout, there would be no measure for him. Inside Klout, executives and staff actively debate the Warren Buffet problem. How do you account for someone who has real-world fame but no online influence?

This inability to qualify influence is endemic in any quantitative metic with limited data sets. Not every non-present celebrity has the presence of mind to create an account for references, like Seth Godin did. Further, there are individuals who may be influential in a specific sector, but not present in social networks.

But are these people truly influential online? Is the Washington Post influential on Twitter even though it gets retweeted all the time?

"Participation is an element," said Fernandez. "And you look at the accounts retweeting the Washington Post and Mashable and there are a lot of bots and not so many influential people retweeting it, but the scale and speed that it occurs, you can't deny there's some influence.

"Influence is such a soft word," he continued. "The idea of influence is everyone's individual lens, and we are trying to standardize it. We struggle with this, and everyone's conversation demonstrates it is a lightening rod. We see the idea of influence as the ability to drive action, and action can include retweets, mentions, and the ability to get people to do things like participate on calls and events."

One of the ways Klout counters the qualitative issue is via subject matter-specific analysis of influence. Further, the company has a taxonomy of influence, thought leader, curators, etc. which allows it to parse what kind of a role they play in social networks. Most of these deeper qualifications and analysis are available online already.

The Ethics of Klout Perks

Klout Perks such as the Virgin America program are not only a way for companies to leverage the database and actively engage influencers, but also a method for Klout to test the validity of the algorithm. The company has built an ethics program around Perks based on several conversations with organizations like the Interactive Advertising Bureau and examining the FCC's disclosure policies.

However, the taking of Perks has raised cries of foul play, some a matter of jealousy and other with a little more substance. In particular the issue centers around social media consultants who are responsible for recommending (or not) Klout to clients, but then participate in the Perks program.

"We're not sending Scoble or big bloggers perks," said Fernandez. "The way we've structured them is to make sure that people don't pollute their Twitter stream. That's the last thing we would want. But we're in a space where everyone is a mid-tier influencer who is probably counseling someone. The percentage of end-users who are participants in Perks, and then use our disclosure recommendations is not as high as we'd like it to be."

Like other matters, ethics remains a matter of debate and evolution at Klout. It's clear that the organization wants to influence more ethical disclosure of its Perks program and is also examining its program on a consistent basis. The company says it values its place in the industry as an influence standard above the Perks program.

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."

Klout says this will make your Klout score more accurate. But in some ways, it's hard to compare the sorts of networks people cultivate via Twitter and those made via Facebook. While it might be relatively simple to get a fair number of your high school graduating class to click through a link to the latest amusing Muppets video, you might not have the same sort of sway on Twitter. For many people, these two social networks are still divided between the professional and the personal.

Currently, Klout only assesses your personal Facebook account. For those who operate pages for their businesses or organizations, the score will not look at that information in order to judge reach and influence.

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?

To mitigate the costs of scaling, users are now being begged to purchase their once-free daily emails containing stats on their new Twitter followers and friends and the tweets that may have led to new followers or losing followers. SocialToo is charging a one-time $20 fee that will reportedly "put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account."

Sure, it might seem like the humane and reasonable thing to do for SocialToo users; after all, we've all got twenty bucks, right?

But over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern reminds us of the old "if you teach a man to fish" adage when he says, "My only concern with the $20 one-time fee is that he has lost nearly all chance to get more revenue from his power users. I assume many of the SocialToo power users will pay the $20 which will provide a quick stream of cash. I'd rather see him set the upgrade as a yearly fee. This way in a year Jesse can bring in new features and grab another set of funds. At this point his only chance to gain more revenue from those newly-paying users would be to offer more services and hope that they will upgrade again."

Today's email/blog post continued, "As always, our auto-follow and unfollow services will always remain free from the time you join SocialToo forward. In addition, you will always be able to create SocialSurveys and share them with your friends for free as we have always provided."

Users are also charged negligible to moderate amounts for other SocialToo services in the usual freemium fashion.

In the past, Stay has made much of Twitter's limiting API calls to 20,000 per hour and their "pulling the rug out from under its developers" by only allowing users to follow maximum of 1,000 people per day. After having leveled such heavy criticisms in the past, stating that Twitter was holding back business growth, it is interesting that his real growth challenge should come in the form of inadequate resources for scaling 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.

"You allow us to twitter in your name. Thus, it's primarily your followers who'll see the magpie-tweets. We're targeting them, not you."

But how much money could you be earning? To test it, I ran a couple of user names through the Magpie estimator to see.

Personally, I stand to rake in an additional 55 Euros a month - roughly $70 US. Richard could earn more than three times that amount, 184 Euros. And Marshall could be reimbursed around 181 Euros a month.

But what about the heavily followed Twitter crowd? Kevin Rose, for example, could stand to make an extra $8,000 a month, Leo Laporte around $15,000 a month, and Barack Obama? A projected $64,000 a month. (Which, ironically, is more than he would make if he gets the job he's gunning for.)

Now, I'm what you would call an "avid" Twitter user. And I have to admit that I'm capable of tweeting useless drivel and alienating followers with the best of them. But there's something about the fact that I'm actually the one doing that inane tweeting that makes it slightly more palatable. I think.

Magpie changes all that. With Magpie, the annoying tweets could - ultimately - be beyond your control. In fact, this "ad in the tweet stream" concept is exactly what people fear Twitter will be doing with their tweet streams in the not too distant future - inserting advertising into conversations that heretofore have been wholly controlled by each user.

Magpie is promoting the service as a way to get into the tweet stream of "popular twitterers." One has to wonder, if those Twitter users - especially those who are already seeing value in their Twitter use - are going to be willing to trade their influence for cash.

I, for one, will keep posting annoying drivel on my own - for free.