I’ve blogged before about a website called Klout. It’s really…interesting. Basically, using all kinds of math things like probably calculus (it’s got to be good for something), Klout stalks you with your permission and finds out how much you post on Facebook and Twitter and other places. Then it stalks all your friends on Facebook and Twitter et al. It’s amazing how Klout can do all that stalking without even moving a muscle. It’s like that guy who can move the table cloth so fast you never even saw him do it.

After snatching up all this private information even faster than Homeland Security can do it, Klout figures out how popular you are. This would have been really useful in high school because then I could have told a few people that they were really not as “all that” as they thought they were. Yes, we used the phrase “all that” when I was fifteen.

Best of all, Klout then takes it upon its stalker-self to tell you how important you are about specific things. It’s all based on you and your friends and everything you talk about. And calculus.

So it made sense when Klout thought I was pretty popular about things like writing and authors and ebooks. I somehow got picked to be important about the Icelandic Volcano back when it erupted and closed down Europe, but I haven’t talked about that much lately. Well, until today.

But Klout has now decided that I am quite influential about a whole new topic.

Yes, I am influential about rabies. I wrote one lousy blog post about creative ways you might go about catching rabies and I’ve been branded as a sexual rabies expert. I clearly remember mentioning SEVERAL TIMES in that blog post that I don’t know squat about rabies and that I had to Google it. I ended up with more questions about rabies than I even started with. But now the whole internet knows I’m a rabies expert.

The really sad thing is I had actually emailed Klout and told them I really needed them to list me as being influential about badgers and no, quite frankly, it really wasn’t any of their business WHY I needed that title. They wrote a lovely follow-up email telling me that it really was out of their control and if I wanted to be influential about badgers I would have to talk about them a lot more.

I don’t know anything about badgers. I’ve never seen a badger up close. I do have a dog that is rumored to be quite the anti-Christ of badger bad-assery, but that is the extent of my badger knowledge. I’ve now used the word “badger” in this blog post seven times, if you count my typing the word “badger” to let you know that I was talking about badgers. Wait, nine times.

If repeating a word over and over doesn’t actually make me an official internet expert on badgers (ten times), then nothing ever will. It’s a tactic politicians have been using for years, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing that mindlessly repeating myself won’t get me anywhere.