The Power Grid (No, Not THAT Power)

Yesterday I had the Adversity Index, today it’s the Power Grid from MediaIte. It attempts to score the power of reporters and writers, media owners, etc, by using a lot of different data points; number of TV minutes, number of Twitter followers, etc. Here’s the view as I write this:

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Being mildly competitive, I have to admit I almost immediately thought – hey, this would be interesting for the SQL community. Then I remembered just how competitive many of us, and how good we are finding chinks in the rules, and started thinking I might spend a lot of time trying to un-game the system.

Would it work? What could we use for data points?

  • # of Presentations (in minutes?) (more score for bigger events?) (or attendee based?)
  • # of Blog posts/comments
  • # of Twitter followers
  • # of Books written (or how about # of words published?) (what about things like an SSC article?) (Do e-books count less or more?)
  • # of minutes of video produced
  • # of questions answered (what’s an answer?)
  • # of network connections
  • SQL Community service

See, I still like the idea! Data capture might be a challenge, but I wonder if I wouldn’t get most of it through the speaker bureau that I hope to build for PASS this year.

Of course it would be fun to try to be number one, but would it just be a game, or would it drive interest in participation that would really benefit the overall community?