Tag: Technology

How to…Measure your online influence using Klout

Ever wonder how much influence your social media input has? Find out with Klout, a free tool that measures your online power and even rewards you.

While we’ve always had the power to influence other people, that power, which is being democratised, is much easier to harness with new social media tools. But how much influence do you have over others? Do your Facebook ‘likes’, retweets, posts and comments go unnoticed, or are you an online mover and shaker? This is where Klout comes in, measuring your influence based on your ability to drive action in social networks, and providing you with an updated Klout Score each morning.

Klout provides insights to help you better understand your own power – whether others trust your opinions online, what topics are you the most influential on and how you compare with your friends. Your Klout Score measures your online influence on a scale of 1 to 100, but the average Klout Score is 20, not 50 – bear that in mind when you get yours.

In this tutorial for Windows: The Official Magazine I show you how to get started with Klout.

Rachael Sharpe

A tutorial for the shopaholics…

If, like me, you find it difficult to keep your receipts together, with the pesky paper ones always getting lost and the digital ones waiting to be accidentally deleted from your inbox, you’ll love OneReceipt. It keeps paper and digital receipts in one place.

Indexing your spending records might sound like heavy work, but OneReceipt has made the process easy. The software will sync to Google and Gmail accounts, automatically pulling receipts into your personal space. Use a different email address? Simply forward your receipts to OneReceipt. Paper receipts are dealt with most impressively – simply take a picture with your phone and email it. The software does the rest.

Organising your receipts is child’s play with OneReceipt’s easy-to-use categorising and tagging system, and its filter search function makes it easy to find things, too. Plus it’s free. In this feature for Windows: The Official Magazine I show you how to get the most from it.

Rachael Sharpe

How to… Create a master password

Today you need a password for pretty much everything. You need one for Windows Live ID, another for your email address, one for each of your social networking accounts and then there are all your banking logons… The list goes on. Hopefully you already know that you should have a different password for each account. If not, a single mistake can leave all your accounts vulnerable to attack.

But although they’re safe, and preferable to using a single insecure password for everything, multiple strong passwords can be difficult to remember and keep track of. That’s why I love KeePass, a free open source password manager that helps you create strong passwords without the need to memorise them all. You put all of your passwords into one database, which is locked with a master key, so you only have to remember one set of login details. In this tutorial for Windows: The Official Magazine I show you how.

Rachael Sharpe

Windows 7 search tutorial published in Windows: The Official Magazine

With documents, emails, songs, photos, video files and more all stored in different places on your computer, it’s no wonder that finding the exact file you want can be time-consuming and bit of a headache. Not in Windows 7, though, because the search function has been overhauled, so it’s both easier to use and faster. Microsoft knows that few of us store all of our files in one place any more, so Windows 7 can also search external hard drives, networked computers, and libraries. Sounds like a lot of search results, right? Not when you can narrow your search instantly using date, file type and so on. There are lots of reasons to love the Windows 7 search feature – you’ll be amazed at how much easier it makes your computing.

Rachael Sharpe

Photo Editing tutorial published in Windows: The Official Magazine

Everyone takes pictures of people, but only by editing them can you achieve perfect portraits to be proud of. The good news is you don’t need expensive photo editing software to make effective adjustments, Windows Live Photo Gallery is perfectly capable. A few quick adjustments enable you to crop your shots for compositions with impact, banish red-eye, remove blemishes, correct colour casts and even exposure – pretty good for free. I show Windows: The Official Magazine readers how to perfect their portraits…

Rachael Sharpe
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