Should you care how high your Klout score is?

Klout, the San Francisco-based startup that is trying to build a Page Rank of online influence, has been taking a lot of fire from critics after making some changes to the way it calculates that influence — an algorithm update that resulted in lower Klout scores for many users.

This led to howls of outrage on the company’s blog, as well as a number of posts arguing that Klout scores are effectively meaningless, since no one really knows how the score is calculated. While these criticisms may be well-founded, however, there is no question that measuring online influence is a huge potential market, and Klout is far from the only one doing it; Google, Twitter and Facebook clearly have their eyes on that prize as well.