Celebrity Help Center - Track your life online

These scenarios are fictional, but here is the advice I would give to these celebs:

“’How popular am I compared to a month ago? What tools can I use to find out? Are people saying nice things about me? Need links to the data pronto, freekin' out!! JB”

Justin Bieber:
There are many useful tools when it comes to tracking your popularity on Twitter. You can of course, utilize Twitter’s tools in tracking your popularity – such as checking your @mentions, #hashtags, etc. However, there are many other useful sites that are affiliated with Twitter, that track your popularity and stats on Twitter, and then display them in a graph, table or other form which can then be read, by hour, day, or month periods. My favorites are Twitter Counter and Tweet Stats. Hope this was helpful!

“Gosh, the Internet is just so big, I had no idea! I need a way to save all the links to the websites I find so I don’t get lost trying to find them again. Is there a way to do that? Also, is there a way to share neat sites I find with my friends?

Sincerely,
Betty”

Mrs. Betty White:
Isn’t it?! One of my very favorite (and I think highly under-used) functions of any browser is the ability to bookmark pages, or create shortcuts right in your browser’s toolbar so that all you have to do is click and there it is! Sites can also be organized into folders by subject, content or whatever other heading you choose which once again are made for easy access in most browsers by simple looking in your bookmarks toolbar. However, in this day and age we have a wonderful new tool called Social Bookmarking. This is a method for users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Not only is this a great way to store sites, and other data found online but also users can then take advantage of Folksonomy or “social tagging” - the process by which users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. A user can save links to pages they want to remember or share, these “bookmarks” are usually public, but can be shared privately or with a network, or certain groups of people. Users can organize these pages with tags and folders allowing others to search through bookmarks by keyword or tag. One of my favorite social bookmarking sites is called Delicious – be sure to check it out!

“I go to a few websites everyday to read about myself but now my kids are getting web savvy. Everyone has their favorite websites but we only have five computers, not enough for a house of 9 people. (Give or take.) I need to speed things up!

Is there a way to track updates from the sites we visit so each person doesn’t have to go to the same website everyday?

Also, how can I read about what people are saying about me if the story isn’t on a site I read each day?

You can reach me on the mobile.
- Kate”

Kate Goslin:
Who has time to check multiple sites everyday?! Especially not a busy, mother of 8 like yourself! It’s times like these when social media aggregators are one of the most useful tools EVER – bringing updates from nearly all your social media sites and other sources to one place! I have a few favorites, but I would definitely recommend Flock. It’s a site that not only collects info from all of your favorite social media sites, but blogs, and even instant messaging tools as well and makes them all available on one “dashboard.” It takes the idea of one-stop-shopping to a whole other level, additionally, unlike some other social media optimization sites, Flock is an actual web-browser- and is actual built from the same open-source code as Firefox. The downside to flock is of course, that it is a download-and-install application, making it something you can only access on home computers or personal computers on which you have installed it. However, this is also a great place to see where you are being mentioned or written about on a daily basis – sites like Twitter, and even a simple Google search could yield similar results for that as well.