Meet the Man Responsible for Klouchebag.com

From the UK, Tom Scott last Friday afternoon launched his delightful goof klouchebag.com, a send-up of San Francisco-based Twitter influence meter klout.com. Within a few hours, media types in LA were tweeting out their “Klouchebag” rating.

“I had the idea the day before [Thursday], after reading this article in Wired,” Scott tells FishbowlLA via email. “I’d been annoyed with the idea of Klout for a while, and that crystalized it. The site was built in a couple of hours of spare time.”

There is no real science behind Scott’s latest project, taglined “The Standard for Asshattery.” Or, as the 27-year-old Brit puts it in his front-page FAQ , his service ‘is about as scientific as Klout’s own measurements — which is to say, it’s pretty much a crapshoot.’

The highest possible ARSE rating (Anger, Retweets, Social Apps, English usage) on Klouchebag is 100. Since the work is all done via a user’s individual browser, Scott is not cataloging or monitoring the results. But he says recipients of a perfect 100 in these initial days have included a “U.S. breakfast radio show,” whose name he cannot recall. There are also a pair of Easter Egg user names that will always return a perfect ARSE score.

For the record, @FishbowlLA’s Klouchebag rating at press time is 14, a.k.a. “quite a nice person.” Scott describes himself as someone who “makes things;” for a list of his other projects, click here. In the meantime, we say to him: “Well done. Bloody good Twitter show.”