The controversial metric of one’s supposed internet influence will see major changes to how it calculates your score, the San Francisco-based company will announce Tuesday. The new calculation, which will raise many people’s scores, takes into account more social graphs and is intended to be more reflective of your true internet influence, said Klout CEO Joe Fernandez in an interview. The update will also include major changes to Klout’s site, which will now show your most popular posts and social media activity and give users more feedback into how particular posts or “moments” influence scores.

“We’re trying to go away from Klout analyzing you to showing how important and interesting you are,” Fernandez said.

The company said it currently has “millions” of registered users, but refused to provide any specifics on either registered users or daily active users.

Back in June, Fernandez told GigaOM’s Ki Mae Huessner that the new updates are intended to be a thoughtful roll out that all users will understand and appreciate.

“We want to make sure that we’re rolling this out in way that we’re providing the information needed for people to understand their Klout scores,” he said. “We want to get it right.”

Whether or not you believe Klout represents your internet influence is of course a personal matter, but if you do, the changes are significant. The company showed me how my own score will rise five points under the new system from 57 to 63, Om Malik’s would rise from 65 to 80, and Barack Obama will move into Klout first place with a score of 99, up from 95. The previously highest-Klouted? Sorry Beliebers, but Justin Bieber is dropping from 100 to 92.

Mathew Ingram has written for GigaOM on whether you should care at all about your Klout score, noting that there’s a lot of money involved in trying to measure online influence, whether or not the Klout is the best way to do it:

The days when people get compensated based on their Klout score or some other ranking of social activity — as Salesforce CEOMarc Benioff discussed at a GigaOM conference last year — may be far off, but there is a multibillion-dollar advertising and marketing machine that is trying to figure out how to measure online influence, and Klout is a major player in that race. Whether it can become the default measurement platform remains to be seen, but this isn’t a race that is going to end any time soon.

But the changes Fernandez is bringing to the new Klout algorithm confronts much of the criticism users lodged at the company at the last update, when most people’s scores went down. The update will take into account information from LinkedIn and Wikipedia, so if you don’t tweet that often but hold a prestigious job at a large company, for instance, your score will better reflect your likely real-world influence. Similarly, if you have Wikipedia pages written about you, that will reflect on your score. Plus, users will be able to see how individual activities affect their scores, addressing some of the transparency issues people raised at the last update.

“There is increased accuracy and transparency in the algorithm now,” Fernandez said, noting that the company is now looking at more than 12 billion pieces of data per day, compared to 1 billion per day about a year ago.

The new scores will be available to users online beginning Tuesday, and the new website and profiles will roll out over the next few weeks. Fernandez said he thinks the updates are a natural progression for the company.

“If we didn’t evolve, that would be a problem,” he said. “If you think about every month there’s a new social network and behaviors change, the score has to grow. And if we didn’t do that we just wouldn’t be doing what we do best.”

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Doodle.ly launched in July 2011 with seed funding from Park Street Ventures. It lets users create hand-drawn art, sketches, notes and doodles from the web or a free iPad app, then share the work on the site and on social networks. Since last year, users — most between 18 and 24 years old — have created about 30,000 doodles. Today Doodle.ly is adding “likes” and popularity rankings; soon users will be able to follow each other.

Doodle.ly has a lot of bad drawings

The new features are necessary because a lot of the drawings on Doodle.ly are bad. The app, with a variety of drawing tools and colors, is fun to use, but unless you’re a pretty good artist, nobody is going to want to like or share your doodles. So far, the bad drawings on the site far outnumber the good ones.

That could be a stumbling block for Doodle.ly in its quest to be the Twitter or Instagram for drawings. Both of those services have their fair share of crappy content, but the average user is likely to be better at writing or taking a picture than drawing or making art. If Pinterest users were able to share only works that they’ve created themselves, the site wouldn’t be as popular or visually appealing as it is. And Regretsy has grown hugely popular by making fun of the worst stuff on Etsy.

Steve Jobs, balloons and cupcakes

The most popular drawing on Doodle.ly is a picture of Steve Jobs created by philosophy professor David W. after Jobs announced his retirement. Doodle.ly calls out artists in the “Talent Gallery” section of its blog.

A lot of new users have trouble deciding what to draw, cofounder Daren Paul told me. “We’ll often see someone draw a balloon or cupcake and then we’ll see many balloons or cupcakes. A big challenge is just people having inspiration.”

The New Jersey Devils and Minnesota Timberwolves

Doodle.ly is making forays into partnerships with sports teams, bands and other organizations. In a recent contest with the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, fans drew play-off themed doodles for the chance to win season tickets and see their drawing printed on 17,000 rally towels. The contest was successful enough that the NHL asked Doodle.ly to work with other teams. Bands like Fictionist and Graffiti6 are using Doodle.ly to collect fan artwork and run contests. Justin Bieber is one of the most-drawn subjects on the site.

“Go back to the earliest ways of communicating — it was cave drawings and hieroglyphics,” Paul told me. “We wanted to create something that felt like an analog experience — like you were using things you got at Staples.”

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In a case filed in Florida federal court, the maker of a “Joustin Beaver” app wants the court to declare it has the free speech right to sell its beaver game in the iPhone store.

The game in question sells for 99 cents on iTunes and features a mop-topped beaver who navigates river obstacles. The critter in question has a similar name and vague physical likeness to the “Baby, Baby” singer:

Last week, reports surfaced that Justin Bieber’s managers were threatening to sue the app makers for using his likeness without permission. App maker RC3 appears to have sued first in an attempt to get the court to declare that its free speech rights trump Bieber’s trademark rights. Here are some excerpts from the suit:

The beaver knocks “Phot-Hogs” that are attempting to take his photograph into the river with his lance. The beaver also signs “Otter-Graphs.” The beaver must also dodge the “whirlpool of success” which will lead beaver out of control

…multiple conversations took place during February of 2012. [RC3] attempted to explain .. that the App was protected under the FIrst Amendment of the Constitution of the United States

Ordinarily, celebrities and famous brands can exercise strong control over how their names are used. But there is an exception in the case of an obvious parody where there is no risk that consumers will be confused. Facebook, for instance, sued a site called Lamebook but then quietly settled the case after Lamebook argued free speech.

These type of questions give rise to questions of whether the defendants are clever parody artists or simply people looking to make a quick buck when a celebrity conflict gives them a wave of publicity.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) doesn’t say how times a given app has been downloaded, but the iPhone version “Joustin Beaver” had been rated 86 times as of Monday. The app is also available on the iPad.

As for Justin Bieber’s other legal troubles, those appear to have been cleared up after the troubled 20-year-old who claimed to have taken his virginity had her paternity suit thrown out of court.

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Metallica may not be the house band for PHP programmers, but it comes close. The heavy metal rockers are the group that most PHP coders like to listen to while they work. This is according to a sample of more than 3,000 PHP programmers surveyed by Zend.

The runners-up for most-popular bands were Pink Floyd and Linkin Park.

Other findings: The PHP faithful seem mightily conflicted over Lady Gaga, who showed up in three categories. She was voted the biggest “guilty pleasure” — meaning that programmers listen to her but do so only with headphones — and she was voted one of the least popular vocalists by respondents.

The most loathed artist nod went to teen sensation Justin Bieber, who was followed by both Lady Gaga and Britney Spears (who was also a runner-up in the guilty pleasures category) in the voting.

Zend chief marketing officer Elaine Lennox said the company — which surveys its users every year on weightier matters — got the idea for the music questions after playing Lady Gaga before its conference in October and immediately witnessing an explosion of negative tweets. “The audience went crazy. We played Lady Gaga and apparently the crowd took exception,” she said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user skuds

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[An earlier version of story incorrectly stated that the Free Justin Bieber campaign was being run by news site, Torrent Freak]

A group called Fight for the Future is claiming that Justin Bieber could be extradited from Canada because he didn’t obtain permission to use the R&B songs in the YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) videos that made him famous. It released the story this morning along with pics of a miserable-looking Biebs hunkered in a cell with an orange jumpsuit and a tear drop tattoo. The site notes that, under the terms of a proposed law, Bieber could end up doing five years of hard time for streaming copyrighted material without permission.

The law in question was proposed in the Senate last May and is titled “A bill to amend the criminal penalty provision for criminal infringement of a copyright.” It proposes to add the words “or public performance” into existing criminal penalties for reproducing or downloading copyrighted works. In plain English, the bill’s goal is to ensure that streaming videos to the public — this would presumably include YouTube videos — are subject to the same tough penalties as other types of unauthorized copying.

According to the Library of Congress, the bill has been in the Judiciary Committee since June.

The story was first reported by TorrentFreak is a popular source for original reporting on the ongoing clashes between copyright owners and individuals who like to share media through technologies like BitTorrent.

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Hosted by Livestream.com, the Never Say Never live stream begins at 4 PM PT/7 PM ET with an behind-the-scenes look at the movie and Bieber himself, followed by two and a half hours of red carpet coverage. The stream is also available on Facebook and mobile devices.

“I’m so grateful for everything that I get to experience, and I know I couldn’t do any of this without my fans. What a cool way for them to experience my movie’s premiere with me!” Bieber says in the official release, speaking exactly the way a normal teenager does.

Bieber, lest we forget, was one of the first mainstream stars that YouTube built, first getting attention online thanks to recital videos that his mom would post for distant relatives. That was in 2007 — and now he’s a global brand with the kind of star power that lets you casually drop by The Daily Show…

and Saturday Night Live.

Livestream has been pushing hard when it comes to drawing high-profile exclusives from the Hollywood scene, hiring away Ustream’s Jeff Varnell last fall to do just that. Recently, Livestream has hosted the 2011 Oscar nominations announcement and has partnered with the Associated Press for awards season coverage and Conan for a weekly live broadcast. Bieber may be new to Hollywood, but he’s still a big draw.

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The year isn’t quite over yet, but Twitter has already come out with the top trending topics for 2010, and surprisingly enough Justin Bieber — the guy who is so popular that Twitter had to modify the way it calculates trending topics — did not take the top slot. That went to the Gulf oil spill. Soccer and movies were also top discussion topics, relegating Mr. Bieber to the number eight spot on Twitter’s list (although he did get number one on the people-related trend list). The numbers came from Twitter’s analysis of more than 25 billion tweets sent during the year.

Trending topics have been a somewhat controversial issue for Twitter over the past week or so, with a number of users accusing the company of censoring its trends to keep WikiLeaks from being a top discussion topic. Twitter eventually posted an explanation of how it arrives at the top trends, noting the feature is designed to show topics that are being discussed more than they have been previously — in other words, if Bieber discussion is hot and heavy for days at a time, then that becomes the benchmark and it will not become a trending topic until it goes above that level.

The top-trending lists are part of Twitter’s “Year In Review” series, which started last week with a list of the top new Twitter users who joined the service during the past year, a list that included late-night TV host Conan O’Brien, Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and His Holiness, the Dalai Lama (among the other royalty who joined this year were Queen Noor of Jordan and Cher). According to the Year In Review page, there are at least three more features coming from Twitter.

While the Gulf oil spill took the top slot overall, with World Cup soccer and the movie Inception next on the list, Twitter also broke its trends down by category, with Bieber taking the people-focused top slot (followed by Dilma Rousseff, the president-elect of Brazil, Lady Gaga and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange). On the top movie-trend list, Inception was followed by Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (the latter of which was a promoted trend, as CNET notes), and the sports list was topped by Lebron James and Wimbledon. Twitter also recorded the top hashtags, which included #rememberwhen, #slapyourself and #confessiontime.

One interesting thing about Twitter’s trending topic lists is just how global they are, and how political and other figures are mixed in with celebrities like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. In addition to the president-elect of Brazil showing up in the people list, others who trended included Zilda Arns, a pediatrician and aid worker who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and died as a result of the earthquake in Haiti, and news events that trended included the Pakistan floods, and a public revolt in Venezuela known as Chavez Tas Ponchao.

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The Ohio-based start-up just launched a new site that tracks the view count of 13,000 YouTube channels, complete with daily revenue estimates. Rhianna is currently the top earner, and her 4 million daily video views translate to roughly $3300 of revenue per day, which would add up to $1.2 million per year. She is followed by Eminem and Justin Bieber, who both bring in $2700 per day (close to $1 million per year each).

The site makes it possible to drill down further and explore which videos of any given publisher are the most profitable. Eminem, for example, owes much of his YouTube success to Rhianna: Their collaboration on Love the Way You Lie brings in an estimated $933 per day. His Real Slim Shady classic, on the other hand, only generates some $28 per day.

All of these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt and regarded as rough estimates rather than actual income. MYU2B explains on its site that the revenue numbers represent “an estimated earning potential of a channel or video, based on the number of views, earning an average CPM of known YouTube partner channels.” In other words: The numbers could be way off if YouTube ends up selling ads with a higher CPM around certain content, which is entirely possible when it comes to music videos. YouTube didn’t respond in time to comment on the accuracy of these estimates, but YouTube has said in the past it pays different partners different CPMs.

The numbers nonetheless show how important music video content has become to YouTube. Eight of the ten top earners are musicians or labels, and five of them are VEVO acts. Two of VEVO’s artists — Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga – recently surpassed a billion views on YouTube each.

Check out VEVO President and CEO Rio Caraeff talking about the rise of the music video at our recent NewTeeVee Live conference below:

This isn’t the first time Gaga and Bieber have competed head-to-head on YouTube. Gaga held the top spot for the most-watched video ever on YouTube for a long time, but got surpassed by Bieber in July. Bieber’s Baby video has now been viewed more than 380 million times, as compared to Bad Romance with 303 million views.

Either way, all of this is good news for VEVO. The major label-owned music video platform publishes both artist’s videos on YouTube, so those billion views are further helping VEVO to establish itself as one of the biggest online video sites.

VEVO President and CEO Rio Cardeff is speaking at NewTeeVee Live tomorrow — and it’s not too late to get a ticket.

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Famecount.com first caught that Lady Gaga’s VEVO channel on YouTube surpassed one billion views this Sunday, a victory the Lady Who Occasionally Wears Meat shared with her fans on Twitter:

Technically, though, Gaga probably passed the billion view mark earlier than Sunday, because there are two dedicated Gaga YouTube accounts. Currently, if you combine the “official” Lady Gaga account with the VEVO one, the total is 1.134 billion.

Justin Bieber, Gaga’s major competitor for views on YouTube, probably isn’t too bummed about being beaten on total views. The music video for the Ludacris collaboration Baby is still the most-viewed YouTube video of all time (now beating Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance by 70 million views), and the trailer for his biopic/concert film Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (in theaters next February) is out today.

While my initial reaction to hearing about this project was to predict the 3-D apocalypse, that’s changed since the announcement that the original director, An Inconvenient Truth helmer Davis Guggenheim, dropped out and was replaced by Step Up 3-D and LXD director Jon M. Chu.

Never Say Never plays directly to Chu’s strengths: specifically, utilizing 3-D technology to create visual spectacle and filming awesome dance scenes. This does not guarantee that it’s going to be good, but the concert sections will at least LOOK good.

So I’m calling it a draw for right now, but it’s time for Lady Gaga’s team to step it up. Because THAT’s the 3-D concert film I want to see.

YouTube’s Hunter Walk and VEVO’s Rio Caraeff will both be speaking at this year’s NewTeeVee Live! You shouldn’t miss it! Register now.

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