But, in seriousness, with those buttons you can see the reach of that post on each social network. It would be fairly trivial for you to verify those numbers are correct and to come to your own conclusions about whether my blog has "influence".
I'm not against badges per se - but I don't like an obfuscated way of calculating something.
Basically, can you expand on: "A vaguely plausible "score" that you can use to justify your "investment" in tweeting all day long."
Thanks
They have a score for you which they can then sell on.
Sme with Kred. You don't sign up - they just assume passive consent.
So if you have a twitter account, they can generate a score for the twitter user using publicly available information and then if you sign up to klout, link these existing calculations to the newly created account.