A View From Precipice Edge

We do not know that Klout will be important in the future, but the partnerships with Bing, Chrome, and many big companies suggest it will be. There are marketing courses now where your grade for the course depends on your Klout score!

“Predicting the Internet's catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996.

(From the Ether) (Industry Trend or Event)(Column)InfoWorld | December 04, 1995 |

Metcalfe, Robert M. | Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996

hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which

only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova

and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. Here's why there soon will be only World Wide

Web ghost pages: Money. Investors poured a lot of money into the Internet but ….”

Claiming today is your birthday or that you are getting married will increase your Klout score temporarily, as will contacting high Klout people and getting them to react back to you. But these strategies are not sustainable.

Being involved in a number of different networks and social media sites helps, but quality trumps quantity. Many high Klout people are not constantly active on sites, may be silent for long periods. Being influential in the real world also helps.

A high Klout score becomes a natural side

effect of behavior you want to be engaging

in anyway!

The music video for the song contains still

shots from high points of the course.

When a cell phone with an extra battery saved my life on Signal Hill in December

2004, it got me thinking about whether this was a

metaphor for how technology will save us all

in the long run.

I will tell you the Signal Hill story and you can come to your own conclusions.

I run Leonard Cohen Nights musical tribute events celebrating Leonard Cohen’s birthday in September in

Edmonton. Vicky Hynes runs a three day Feast of Cohen between Christmas and New Years, in St. Johns, Newfoundland. In 2004 she asked me and my wife to join them for their event as a special guest. We arrived December 28th with

plans to attend the December 29th

performance at 8 pm.

The evening of the 29th and morning of the 29th we had

nothing to do and it sat there majestically looking back at us! “Come to me” it seemed to say.

This becomes important later in

the story!

We did notice there were no footprints in the fresh fallen snow on the trail!

!

My coat was very slippery and we

were cold enough to have stopped shivering, an

ominous sign!

The circuit board of the phone kept freezing up and

shorting our from the sea spray but by warming the phone and battery in my

hand and replacing one battery as the other froze I was able to make the

call.

Five stayed on the safe ground above us and one

rappelled down to our steeply inclined icy rock perch. He connected the two of us and our digital

camera to the rope and we gradually inched back to

safety one by one.

We freshened up and were able to make it to our seats

of honor at the Feast of Cohen show right on time

at 8 pm!

If the default position of human beings is to have a cell phone, is it correct to say that we are saved by cell phones regularly, or is that the

wrong way to think about it? We reset life’s expectations to where we are always able to reach others when we need them. That becomes

just normal life.

Is it possible we are safer because of technology and just don’t realize it? Safety accompanies abundance

and post-scarcity.

Is it possible Klout is making us better more goal directed Internet

citizens?