By Staff Writer – John Federico (@gadgetboy)

PR firm Edelman Public Relations has launched its own twitter measurement tool. The tool, called TweetLevel, is a qualitative tool that measures a Twitterers “gravitas” or importance based on the content of their tweets. It takes some serious semantic mojo to accomplish that and I have to wonder if Edelman is up to the task.

Of course, TweetLevel doesn’t ignore numbers altogether. It does take into account the number of followers a Twitter account may have and the account’s “participation” in the community (I assume that means tweet frequency). However, the tool places a much greater weight on what is being said and how trustworthy an individual twitterer may be.

Using a 100-point scale, here are some of TweetLevel’s highest rated Twitterers:

• Perez Hilton (score: 86.5)
• Mashable (86.3)
• Twitter Tips (85.2)

Perez Hilton!? Edelman’s developers may have to go back into the lab for a rewrite…

Microsoft PR Agency of Record Waggener Edstrom launched a similar tool called Twendz earlier this year. Twendz monitors trending topics on Twitter while providing sentiment analysis on those topics. As of this post, I was unable to get Twendz running in Chrome, Firefox or Safari on my MacBook running Snow Leopard 10.6.2. The Company plans to offer a premium version of the tool later this year.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0