Ever since it was first introduced in 2009, Klout has seen its fair share of fans and critics. Fans use Klout to highlight their online influence in order to snag freebies, and businesses use Klout to identify socially influential customers whom they can give upgrades to, in exchange for some nice press.

I can’t remember the last time I actually went into my bank in person. Simply because there is no longer any need to. My salary is electronically transferred to my account, my bills are paid via online banking and automatic transfers, my account statements are available online as PDF files…..gone are the days of paper checks, going to the bank to deposit my salary, and getting paper statements in the mail.

As someone who spends at least 12 hours a day in front of two computer monitors, my desktop wallpaper has become very important to me. After all, this is what I am staring at all day, and I’ve found that having the same picture on my screen is rather boring to say the least. Wouldn’t it be nice instead to see a wide variety of rotating images, so that you never know what is coming next?

We are heading into an era of huge technological advances and achievements, especially in the field of medicine. Problems and conditions that may have literally been the death of you a hundred years ago may now be cured, simply by taking advantage of the latest medical technological breakthroughs. And 3D printing may have a huge part in that.

Hot on the heels of our last Q&A session with the Windows Live Hotmail team, is our next Q&A with Erik Martin who is the “General Manager and Nerd Herder” at the popular social network Reddit. For the next few days, Erik has graciously agreed to answer all of your questions relating to Reddit. Have you got a burning question you want to ask him? Then put it in the comments section and Erik will check in periodically and try to answer you.

Seems hard to imagine, doesn’t it? A world without Internet (or as I like to call it, The Dark Ages). A time when the latest technology consisted of a Sony Walkman cassette player and a VHS video recorder (or Betamax, if you are REALLY that old to remember that far back). A time of newspapers instead of Google News, and a time of posting letters through a mailbox instead of email. I know, scary stuff.

When the Internet hit the mainstream and everyone jumped into email, personal websites and online banking, it became inevitable that the criminals and organised crime gangs would not be far behind, with their devious plots, schemes, scams, hustles and heists. There’s always enough gullible people that will fall for the craziest stories which makes it easy for the gangs to make a profit.

Nothing on the Internet ever stays the same way for long. The Net is an ever-changing, ever-evolving thing and what is hot today may not be hot tomorrow. I mean, when was the last time you heard of the Netscape browser? Or the Alta Vista search engine?

After several months of owning an iPhone, I am still learning new things about it every day, things I never realised I could do with it. For example, did you know you can make phone calls with it? That is utterly amazing. Here I was thinking that an iPhone was only good for checking email and updating Instagram, and suddenly it rings and someone is talking to me at the other end! Absolutely amazing technology.

I love my iPhone but there are a couple of pet peeves that I have had with it from day one. One of them was something which I managed to miraculously solve this morning, which was the strange enigma of iPhone photos refusing to turn around the right way, when transferred to the PC and viewed with the default Photo Viewer in Windows Explorer.

MakeUseOf has previously published several infographics on texting, such as when texting celebrated its 19th birthday, when we showed teens and their texting habits, and how SMS messaging is changing the world. But one texting-related subject that I haven’t approached yet (mainly because I didn’t want my boss to fire me for turning MakeUseOf into Hustler magazine) is “sexting”.

Over the past year or so, MakeUseOf has published quite a few articles on Hotmail, the email service that everyone loves to bash. However, James has told you why we should let it back into our hearts as well as profiling a new feature that Hotmail has introduced to combat grey mail. Now, the Hotmail Development Team is standing by, waiting to take your questions! Do you have a burning question you want to put to them?

In the past PG (Pre-Google), people on dates could get away with outrageous fibs. But these days, with everyone’s lives online on social networks, finding out if you really are the former President of the United States, as you claim you to be, is just a few clicks away from being either verified or exposed as a huge lie.

I was under the impression that I was a pretty enthusiastic user of Facebook, but it seems that I am minor small beans compared to some people, who have been labelled “Facebook Power Users” (sounds like a superhero team, fighting the bad guys by “poking” them). Are you one of these Power Users who seemingly make up 20-30% of Facebook?

One of the best things about an iPhone 4S is the Siri speech recognition app, but as I have increasingly noticed, it doesn’t seem to like me and my Scottish accent (cue lots of moments where I want to search on Google for big boobies and it phones my wife at work instead). Nevertheless, Siri is starting to grow on me, and on Bakari too, who previously showed us some cool location-aware Siri tips.