I try to stay on top of the latest media trends but admittedly often feel like a laggard.  I started lurking Quora a year or so ago and started thinking about their ability to rank your credibility in a given topic.  I could be highly influential in one niche area but fall into the masses in most others.  Being able to calculate that influence is an interesting opportunity to be solved.  Klout seems to be on the case.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts about Klout.  Is it a trusted measure of influence?

I’ll make a claim that Quora’s real value could be in assigning a contextual score to a person’s post, not as an aggregation site for Q&A.  If I’m posting an answer about the origins of RPC and its use in the architectural visualization market it should rank extremely high (I invented it) relative to an answer I might most on who I think should be President of the United States (I have an opinion about it).

Quora’s biggest impact could be to define that contextual score and figure out how to carry it across the web.  I posted a comment to that effect on one of Mark Suster’s (@msuster) blog posts about Disqus recently.  http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/03/07/im-sticking-with-disqus-heres-why/#comment-162092158

I’ll claim that aggregation sites don’t scale well. I started thinking about this recently while contemplating the future of sites like Quora. Quora works well now while there are a limited number of users but I’m not convinced they can keep their magic as the popularity of the site increases. You can think about the quality of content as inversely proportional to the number of contributors after you reach a certain point.

A corollary to this would be that Quality Control doesn’t scale well.