Webometricians are NOT Web Celebrities!!

When it comes to being a web celebrity, it is not surprising to find that webometricians are near the bottom of the pile; a fact I blame on our spending too much time counting other people's links rather than creating content worth linking to. Anyway, Wired have created a nifty little application (highlighted by Media Futurist) that can help you determine your 'web celebrity' score by using data from Google's Social Graph.

At the moment it only bases your score on MySpace, Twitter, and your blog/web site, so your score depends a lot on how much you use these sites; my thousands of Facebook friends and hundreds of delcious bookmark followers mean nothing. Nonetheless, true to Webometric Thoughts fashion, a comparison of the three main webometrics blogs/bloggers(only using their twitter and blog addresses):

Holmberg's Oh what a tangled web we weave... :
2 (twitter) + 4 (blog) = 6
Thelwall's Webometrics Blog :
10 (twitter) + 15 (blog) = 25
My Webometric Thoughts:
6 (twitter) + 7 (blog) = 13

To give these numbers a bit of perspective, Barack Obama's current ranking is 9,069 (4,509 without MySpace). Thelwall may have won this battle, but we are all losing the war. It would be interesting to see, however, how the Celebrity Meter compares with a qualitative evaluation of web celebrity, such asForbes' list of the top 25 web celebrities.

Whilst 'web celebrity' is just a bit of fun, it does show the potential of the Google Social Graph data, and as far as I am aware no webometrician has used it to any practical purpose yet.