If you think social media is here to stay, then you probably should understand Klout. No, my spell check has not gone haywire. Klout, a San Francisco-based company started in 2008, helps measure your online influence. It does this by aggregating data from your social networks and then issuing a score ranging from 1 to 100 that is supposed to accurately reflect your influence throughout the Internet. Klout has been criticized by many for its methodology in deriving user scores, as well as its accuracy in reflecting real-world social influence (for example, teen pop star Justin Bieber has a higher Klout score than President Obama). These criticisms, though perhaps valid, miss the larger objective of Klout, which is to curate, classify, and ultimately monetize online influence.