@ChaseTheTruth - I've never liked the term "thought leader" or "personal branding." They sounds slimy and self-serving when the best are anything but.

Thoughtly's website does a very poor job of communicating what it does, imho. It's unclear what the mobile app is used for and the "paste signature" to prove expertise is unclear. Anyone use this?

Thanks for jumping in, @ChaseTheTruth! Similarly, I've written about the related topic of how blogging is the new resume (for some) and a great way of articulating your expertise/way of thinking. If the primary purpose of Thoughtly is to prove and uncover people with expertise, how are you going to instill confidence? Today employers don't know about Thoughtly so why would they trust you?

Is this a product for quantifying the domain authority of an author? For example, Eric Ries would have a high authority for the keyword "lean startup", even if the specific article I'm viewing may not be popular on Twitter. In contrast, Joe Schmoe write's a single post on lean startups that goes viral as his first blog article ever. So even though Joe's article has more tweets than Eric's, I should actually trust Eric's content more because he is a domain authority. Would love to know if that's Thoughly's premise and correct me if I'm wrong. I poked around on the site but couldn't pinpoint the value proposition from the content.

That's great regarding blogging (and various online involvement), it has inherent value that is often disregarded. We think expertise, thought-leaders and influencers are trite (and rather annoying) words. They require you either be popular or are ordained by a third party as interesting. We aggregate content to let users decide what is inherently valuable and let data speak for itself. We stay away from subjective gold-stars and encourage dissent. To answer your question, if someone trusts a resume, they certainly would trust objective data. :-)

@AndyGCook @rrhoover Hi guys! Thanks for the interest and I hope we can help clarify a few outstanding issues. I created Thoughtly because many of my hobbies and interests - things I spend a lot of my time learning and writing about - are not reflected in my resume or in any single online profile. Written discussions online are generally insulated within specific communities (Stack Overflow, Reddit, Blogs, etc.), making it difficult for users to retain their credibility as they cross platforms. So we set out to quantify written discussion online and display them in a centralized portfolio. By enabling people to quickly display the extent of their involvement in a field, we provide context for online discussion. Your Thoughtly signature is a link to your online profile - which displays a summary of your written contributions online. It took a better part of a year to spec out everything and build a tool that sufficiently processes and accurately aggregates written content. We also think that natural language processing is a hole in the quantified self movement. Words can be valuable data too. We add value both for people like Eric Reis, and for others. Although Eric Reis is well-known in entrepreneurship, Thoughtly would allow him to display the depth of his involvement in entrepreneurship, but most importantly put his involvement in context. The two most obvious value propositions are first is on resumes, where context for life experience and outside interests is missing. As we move away from degrees to skills, the importance of quantifiable involvement in an area is increasingly valued! Secondly in comment sections and social media. It's easy to throw around statements online, but I think it would be great to be able to demonstrate both conventional (scholarship) and unconventional (Blogs, Q&A, Reddit, etc.) experience to speak with authority everywhere.

@rrhoover Absolutely. It's very hard to take them seriously and honestly there are so many gems waiting to be discovered that have solid data to back up their insight, without the need to be referred to as an "Influencer."

Congrats @ChaseTheTruth!