How we calculate these influence ranks

We calculate your influence rank using a range of measures

1. We look at the links that you recommend to your networks and analyse the content and context of those links

2. We look at how well the rest of the world views that content. Did other people believe it had an impact? Did other people tweet that link (or best of all retweet you?)

3. We look at whether you discover / recommend items early, whether you amplify links found by others or whether you are a bandwagon-jumper (nothing wrong with that).

4. We qualify your activity against your normal measure of activity and the levels of activity on a given subject.

We weigh these factors up and come up with an influence score on a per topic basis. From this influence score  we build a ranking, and that allows you to say that, ta da, you are the 3rd most influential person on a given topic.

We recalculate these rankings frequently, more than once a day. Our plan is to increase the frequency with which we do these calculations.