Foobang! is a newly available app for iPhone that aggregates every bit of news information of your preferred celebrities into a source on your phone. The break down the goods on their website:

In a matter of seconds, you can instruct Foobang! to retrieve information about your favourite stars, athletes, TV show hosts, models and politicians.

Foobang! continuously crawls thousands of sites, blogs, and Twitter feeds for the information you want the most.

Thanks to its push notification system, you’ll always be the first to be informed. As soon as any article on one of your favourite celebrities is published, it is instantly analysed and sent to your phone.

If you’re wondering about the stalkery applications of this iPhone app, uh… yeah. Watch this movie that Foobang! put together that I guess is supposed to show you how easy it is to follow around celebrities but leaves me feeling very disturbed with how it’s narrated. Do they really want you to use the app this way? Ugh. Just watch it.

See what I mean? Stalker-ific.

If that’s your thing, though, Foobang! could be an asset to you. As you see below, it basically crawls “thousands of sites” on the Internet for every crumb of information about your victim target celebrity of choice:

Celebrity gossip is ubiquitous enough in our culture that Foobang! isn’t really encouraging a new habit in people – it’s just streamlining the existing habits of people who already follow celebrities’ lives into one convenient iPhone app. Still, I’m pretty sure that if you use the app the way the uncomfortably curious gentleman in the Foobang! video above uses it, it’s likely that Foobang! will not pay for your court costs when you are arrested for stalking famous people who really want to eat their dinner in peace. So caveat emptor, iPhone users/celebrity followers: the app is currently available in the iPhone Apps Store.

Now, with applications like Creepy, stalking your prey developing a pattern of behavior for someone of interest, especially if they are ignorant in the ways of geo-technology, is even easier. According to Creepy’s developer, ilektrojohn, the application does the following:

creepy is an application that allows you to gather geolocation related information about users from social networking platforms and image hosting services. The information is presented in a map inside the application where all the retrieved data is shown accompanied with relevant information (i.e. what was posted from that specific location) to provide context to the presentation.

In other words, creepy aggregates user data from Twitter, provided the user has turned on the location feature, and data from EXIF tags from photos posted to Flickr, among other image-sharing sites.

This data is then mapped on a service like Google Maps, and presto. You can now see the geolocation profile of the user who was queried. Essentially, you’ll get a detailed geo-web based diary of the person’s movements and activities, based on their check-ins and image uploads. Granted, in order to use creepy, knowing the user name of the target in question is essential. While that isn’t much of a problem on Twitter, finding out this information about Flickr users, as well as other image services, may be more problematic. Good thing TwitPic is also represented by the creepy app.

Now, for those of you worried about this explosion in harness-able geo-data, and fear everybody everywhere tracking your every movement, Mike Melanson over at ReadWriteWeb.com has a perspective that might put people at ease:

So, should you stop broadcasting your location? I vote no. (And not because I want to stalk you, I swear.) I share my location all the time and for a number of reasons. It enables random and serendipitous connections to occur. I can look back and have all sorts of contextual information as I weave my way through the world. I can plug it all in to services like MemoLane and get a time-ordered snapshot of my own life, as I share it online.

Of course, this little tidbit at the end of Melanson’s post might make you reconsider:

This isn’t for everyone. If you have bad relationships with your exes or lawyers coming after you for bills, you might not want to live so publicly. And are we that far off from insurance companies gathering check-in information and using it to calculate your premiums?

Or how about unsolicited, contextual advertising based on your current location, delivered directly to your mobile device of choice? Does the idea of that creep you out? Granted, the Creepy app does nothing of the kind, but if a freelance developer can do something like this in their spare time, what kind of data collection utilities do you think companies like AT&T have?

Here’s a little art project video from Chris Oakley showing the potential of this tracking technology. While Oakley’s work is fictional, it seems quite plausible and quite surprising:

Devon Lynn Townsend managed to get access to Bennington’s Yahoo email account from her work computer. It was the start of extensive stalking of the star, and ended with Townsend fired and possibly going to jail.

The information filing (PDF) submitted to the US District Court for New Mexico showed Townsend faced charges of stalking, unlawful access to stored communications, and unauthorized fixation of and trafficking in sound recordings.

Following the path of theft reveals just how a determined and skilled individual can make life a nightmare for another person. It started with Townsend somehow getting Bennington’s email address, and accessing a Yahoo server to change the email account’s password.

She tracked emails that included pictures of Bennington’s children, a copy of Linkin Park’s contract with Warner Brothers Records, and details of the family’s travel plans. Federal authorities said she also gained access to Bennington’s Verizon Wireless account, including detailed bills with phone numbers, and to his PayPal account.

Townsend also created two other email accounts with Yahoo, and used them to taunt Bennington’s wife, Talinda, and friends of the family. One email Townsend sent included a link to an article about cyberstalking.

The stalking took place between January and November 2006. Townsend faces fines of $250,000 and a jail term of five years for each of the three counts against her.

I picked up on this story from Ms. B.L. Ochman’s blog who in turn got it from IABC Caf and what a delightful story it was. Ochman finished her entry reminding PR people not to do this, it’s a very bad idea. I got my degree in PR myself and one of the first things told to us is that most press releases go into the wastebasket.

There’s a program out there called ReadNotify which gives folks tons of information about the paths an email but, as Ochman pointed out, do everyone a favor and don’t inform people you know all about your email. Sometimes it’s just for the best.

Anyone tempted to chastise another who’s deleted a press release or something similar should probably go back to class and read up on manners.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Now let me be very quick to say here that I don’t mean physically following them around, finding out where they live, etc! And while I would love to claim credit for the term, I first heard Joel Christopher use the phrase.

What I mean is, learn how to market and run your business by watching how someone who is already successful is doing it.

It is a given that the best way to learn how to do something is by learning directly from an expert. It significantly cuts down on the time and expense it takes to master the topic, and stops you from going off on the wrong track.

Online there are many opportunities for learning from others. There are newsletters and sites that offer interviews with people who are already successful. There are teleseminars where you can listen to experts talking over the phone or the web. You can pay for a consultation, or perhaps be lucky enough to convince an expert to be your mentor.

Finally, of course, you can buy their ebooks.

But, it is almost a given that the experts aren’t revealing *all* of their secrets. They may not even be holding back intentionally – it is possible they have forgotten to mention a small but crucial thing that they do, which makes all the difference in their business.

But if you watch how they work, you can learn a lot.

How do they structure their web site and/or sales letter? How do they entice you to sign up to their lists?

If they run a newsletter, how do they put it together? How do they get their personality across?

How do they promote new products? Are they sending out special mailings (and if so, how often), or doing it inside their newsletter?

Do they offer ecourses, and if so how are they structured? Do they refer to other courses, products, etc that they offer?

What about their follow-up process? Admittedly this means that you have to buy their product, but this may not be a bad thing (you can see how they put together their order process – and hopefully whatever you are buying is good too!). How do they follow up with you? When and how do they offer new products to you, or freebies, or additional information?

Where do they advertise? How do they advertise? If they run an affiliate program, how do they attract affiliates? What additional information do they provide their affiliates to sell their products (and how can you do something similar to sell your own products).

Now it won’t be possible to find out *everything* your chosen expert does. And you can’t just copy what you learn exactly – you will need to modify it to suit your situation.

But you should be able to get a good idea of how they work. And you will gain valuable insights into methods you can apply to your own online business.

Copyright 2003 Jason Anderson

Jason is the editor of Achieve Net Profits, where he interviews successful Internet marketers each week. Save yourself time and money by learning marketing directly from the pros! –> http://www.AchieveNetProfits.com/