In my continuing hunt to understand online presence and influence I have been alerted to a new beta site called QDOS that believes it has a means of measuring and therefore managing the way we look online.

According to the website someone's QDOS (kudos) score is calculated on three different variables:

Popularity
Who you know and the extent of your online network.

Impact
How much people listen to what you say online.

Activity
What you do online e.g. shop, chat, blog.

Individuality
How easy you are to find online according to your name, your age etc

Currently this is only available for UK adults but I hope they roll this out across to more regions. The methodology of this is pretty vague and my results were skewed depending on whether I was 'Jonny' or 'Jonathon' and whether I listed my work or home address.

Nevertheless, random poles in our office seemed to demonstrate that those who had a bigger online presence (through blogs, forums, twitter etc) had a higher score than those who didn't. One strange result was that my colleague who sits opposite me has a similar score to me and yet doesn't communicate online at all. Hmmmm.

The brains behind this is the Garlik (online identity experts) who founded the Internet bank Egg, so even though I don't know what the secret source is, I am sure that there is some pretty robust mathematics included.

I will keep track of this site - it certainly addresses some of the arguments I have previously raised.