Wolfram Alpha not a threat to Google.... YET!!!

Holy brain strain, Batman! Wolfram Alpha has just gone live!

For those of you who don't know, WolframAlpha.Com is a new, computational search engine which some have described as the first real competitor to Google. As a marketer, I try to look beyond that fluffy crap and see what's really behind the statement.

Well, my first impressions of Wolfram Alpha were exactly what I'd expect from most people.... booooooring. But that has NOTHING to do with Wolfram Alpha. It's because, like most of you, I've been conditioned to type all kinds of things into Google and get some kind of pertinent result from which I could continue my research.

Easy, right? Google has become a household word and "googling" is now an official verb. So who needs Wolfram Alpha?

LOTS OF PEOPLE!

At first, it's going to seem as if only nerdy, techy-types are going to be the ones going ga-ga over Wolfram Alpha but, MARK MY WORDS:

The more people use Wolfram Alpha the more they will discover some amazing everyday uses for people from all walks of life and the more they will create tutorials to help people learn how to use Wolfram Alpha efficiently. You'll see what I mean... watch the following video as the founder, Stephen Wolfram, demonstrates some of the power of Wolfram Alpha and it's astounding ability to take bits of information and drill down into a myriad of fascinating, fact-filled results which, if you're not careful, can become quite addictive.

Click Here and Watch the Wolfram Alpha Demonstration

Trust me, watch the video. If you just go to Wolfram Alpha and dive in with your "Google-conditioned" mind, you're apt to think Wolfram Alpha is a nerd's boring dreamworld. But, once you watch the video demonstration, you won't be able to help but realize there's a whole lot of power in them there hills!

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Consolidating Multiple Google Gmail Accounts for Greater Power and Efficiency

Anyone who knows of, and uses, Google's Gmail, has more than likely created multiple gmail accounts. Why? Because they're easy to use, easy to keep organized, and, best of all, they're FREE. Eventually, however, some of us end up with a disease best referred to as "GMAILITIS" - inflammation of our Google Gmail experience.

Personally, I have about 10 Gmail accounts. That really isn't that much but, still, keeping track of all of them (and remembering to check in) really does get out of control. So, here's what I've done to simplify EVERYTHING so that I can control them all from ONE Gmail account.

1. Create a Gmail catchall account. Name it anything you want but it's probably best if you include some reference to "catchall" or "total" or anything relevant to its purpose in the name (do not worry, the account name will never be used in replies.)
2. Set Each Gmail Acct to Forward to the New Catchall. Simple enough. In each Gmail accounts settings, click the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab and the first section allows you to set your forwarding details. It's up to you whether or not you want to leave a copy of the forwarded email in the original Gmail acct. Personally, I don't and I'll show you why in a second.
3. Create a Filter & Label for Each Gmail Acct In Your Catchall Account. In your new catchall account, find the link that says "create filter" and, in "filter creation" mode, fill the "TO" section with the email address of one of your forwarding Gmail accounts. After clicking "NEXT STEP", you'll have the option of creating and assigning a "LABEL" to the forwarded emails you'll be filtering. In each case, you should probably name the filter something that would remind you of the place from which it came. So, if, for example, you are receiving an email forwarded from abc123@gmail.com, you'll probably want to assign the label abc123 to it.
4. Create a Reply-to for Each Forwarded Acct In Your New Catchall Account. After you have all your gmail accts forwarding to your new catchall account -- and, after you have a filter set to label each incoming email forwarded to your new catchall, you'll want to create a "reply-to" for each gmail acct so that if you want to reply to any of the forwarded emails, you can do so with the "reply-to" address of the corresponding gmail account. So, when you reply to forwarded email abc123@gmail.com, you can reply AS IF you are writing FROM abc123@gmail.com even though you are writing from within the catchall account. This option is set by clicking the "Account" tab in Gmail settings and following the "reply-to" instructions.

If this doesn't make sense, then comment below with any questions you might have. But if it does make sense, then you've got one pretty powerful setup for widespread communication requiring multiple Gmail accounts.

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Wikipedia - Google's Anna Nicole Smith

Remember that old set of Encyclopedia Britannica you have... somewhere downstairs? growing mold? up high, on a dusty old, shelf? Remember that one?

Don't Throw Those Old Encyclopedias Away Yet!

It seems there's another juicy bit of controversy going around.

The case I'm about to make is SO nefarious and worthy of extreme scrutiny that I'm surprised it hasn't been raised before in much greater detail.

My Assistant

Beginning with Fantomas' Fantomnews, Ralph Tegtmeier refuses to pull punches in both the name and the writing of his article, "The Spammer’s Guide to Wikipedia Hacking", a pretty-much, tongue-in-cheek look at how Google blindly throws its ability to manipulate search rankings behind a site that is uber-ripe for gaming,

"If you though that Wikipedia was a mildly nutty but essentially benevolent amateur community effort at an unprecedented scale, leveraging the wisdom of crowds to create an immensely useful repository of human knowledge - well, there’s no need to rethink that view as long as you know that you’re dealing with a venture that’s wildly unreliable and inaccurate in too many respects to seriously compete with the professional setups such as the Encyclopedia Britannica and others."

Of course, I'm going to take it a step further and say that there's nothing mildly nutty or essentially benevolent about it. It's EXTREMELY nutty and very dangerous. In case anyone hasn't quite noticed, there's a cute little Kumbaya-type slogan on the very top of Wikipedia's front page that goes like this:

Just In Case You're Brainfogged By All the BS Floating Around the Net These Days, Let Me Spell It Out For You:

SOCIAL ENGINEERING. HI GOOGLE.

Remember that AT BEST, Wikipedia is that "mildly nut bunch of essentially benevolent amateurs"? Well, at worst, it's an "extremely nutty bunch of amateurs with a naiveté that is essentially dangerous." Just how in the heck do these nutty, naive amateurs imagine that YOU can change the world just by donating money? Even at its very outset, that premise is speculative and borderlines on the ridiculous.

In Fact, Guess Where I Got This

"Before one can engage in social engineering, one must have reliable information about the society that is to be engineered, and one must have effective tools to carry out the engineering."

If you guess Wikipedia, you get a cookie and go to the head of the class. More precisely, it was in a sub-heading of "Social Engineering" titled, "Social Engineering Through History". But doesn't it all just sound so nice?

But, one very astute Digger, in response to the Digg pictured above wrote,

I'm not quite sure developing countries need Wikipedia on DVDs.
I'm not quite sure how much different Wikipedia on a book is different from an encyclopedia.
I'm not quite sure how much information you'll be able to fit on a pamphlet.

So you see, when you're sitting at home feeling pretty much like a powerless geek, the mere idea that donating $5 to Wikipedia can somehow transform you into a revolutionary for social change is understandably attractive. But like our "comrade digger", we, too, can avoid being sucked into a "social engineering funnel" if we just take a few seconds to put our precious grey matter to use.

Do you understand? Even just for starters, it reeks of such incredible juvenile thinking. Is there anything wrong with Britannica other than it doesn't employ nutty people who are essentially naive about their pawn-like contribution to social engineering? Or that socialists everywhere hate the fact that Britannica is a capitalist company that pays taxes in the U.S.?

Slow and Steady Wins the Race and with a Consistent,
3,600 Alexa Ranking, Britannica Ain't No Slouch

What is the Best Online Encyclopedia?

Which Brings Us Back to Google:

The Company That Censored Search Results for the Government of the Peoples' Republic of China

If Wikipedia is so awesome, and so capable of changing the world - and if Wikipedia, due to it's SugarDaddy, Google, is experiencing an impressive Top 10 traffic ranking in Alexa, then why, pray tell, are there only 26,000 donations?

After all, WE can change the world, right? So why aren't WE?

I'm not quite sure developing countries need Wikipedia on DVDs.
I'm not quite sure how much different Wikipedia on a book is different from an encyclopedia.
I'm not quite sure how much information you'll be able to fit on a pamphlet.

I think it's a safe bet that there's a LOT more who aren't quite sure from where he came. Oh, I'm sure, when that first Wikipedia DVD hits the streets of Chad or Madagascar, there'll be no shortage of news-hungry outlets covering it, but will it really be changing the world? No, it won't. If it were... if it could, there'd be no need to reinvent the wheel. Truly benevolent, non-nutty minds would just go to Encyclopedia Britannica and impress upon them their concept of changing the world by spreading DVD encyclopedias all around impoverished nations (accurate, non-gamed encyclopedias, mind you). But it's not about changing the world. As you'll soon understand, it's about "dreaming about" changing the world.

Btw, isn't that why nutty people think radical Islamists hate us? Because we spread our influence all over the place in the belief that we're doing good?

Do Wikipedians think they'll want copies of Wikipedia DVDs in Saudi Arabia? Yemen? Syria? Iran? Maybe Al-Qaeda would be more accepting of Wikipedia's world-changing DVDs if only the U.S. would get out of Iraq. I'll bet there's a bunch that actually believe that.

The Truth Is More Likely That...

Wait, isn't that the Nazi salute? ;-)

...it wouldn't matter if, even a year after this article, there were 100,000 donations made to Wikipedia. Because, if we take the quote with which Wikipedia so kindly provided us earlier...

"Before one can engage in social engineering, one must have reliable information about the society that is to be engineered, and one must have effective tools to carry out the engineering."Social engineering (political science)

...we can begin to see why Google plays J. Howard Marshall to Wikipedia's Anna Nicole Smith. Wikipedia doesn't know jack squat about the society that is to be engineered (in this case, the whole world). But once again, we have to thank those mildly nutty, borderline dangerous, naively manipulatable bunch of Wikipedians for helping us find a quote to couple with the previous one:

"Social engineering (security) is a collection of techniques used to manipulate people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. While similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery for information gathering or computer system access and in most cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the victim." Social engineering (security)

And that, of course, is where Google comes in.

Conclusion

Some may chalk it up to a difference of styles... or "professional courtesy", when well-known personalities in the SEO world acknowledge such odd results in a more toned-down or tongue-in-cheek way:

"By fixing the above issues, they may very well rank for the remaining 11 keywords." Aaron Wall, When Will Wikipedia Rank for Everything?

"From my perspective, there may be slightly less of an incentive for spammers to hit Wikipedia pages in the short term, but no less value to serious marketers seeking to boost traffic and authority by creating relevant Wikipedia links." Randy Fishkin "Wikipedia Finally Makes the Right Decision"

But, you see, this isn't just SEO - this is big-time social engineering on the part of Google. Rather than BUY Wikipedia, which they can't anyways, and screw it all up with their "Do No Evil"-style of evil, they just get Wikipedia drunk with lots of Google juice. And just like J. Howard Marshall gave Anna Nicole money and Howard K. Stern (allegedly) gave Anna Nicole drugs, none of them really cared WHO she slept with as long as she'd flash them her ta-tas once in a while.

I'll say it again - Google doesn't care about you. The only thing they care about is serving ads - the more targeted the better. And as long as all the mildly nutty, essentially benevolent, little do-gooding Wikipedians think that their 26,000 donations "to-date" are going to help them spread Wikipedia goodness all throughout Chad and the Ivory Coast, then we can thank them for helping Google to better "serve" (read: game) us.

EARTH TO GOOGLE AND WIKIPEDIA...!

ILLITERATE, STARVING CHILDREN CAN'T READ OR EAT DVDS.

AND JUICING UP WIKIPEDIA SO YOU CAN STUDY US EVEN MORE IS EVIL.

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How to Avoid Google's Duplicate Content Penalty

Content geeks, beware!

In the realm of theory, where most computer-bound geeks spend the bulk of their existence, ANYTHING is possible; any outcome arguable; any action justifiable. But reality is often far more interesting than that.

So when it comes to reading articles on your favorite topics, do you really care if it was written by an expert?  Do you really care if it was written by someone who really had direct experience with it?  After all, most of us were trained in school to be able to research and write about various topics independently of whether we'd direct experience with them or not.  Did that render our assignments worthless?  Can they still help a seeker progress along his or her path?

I Think So.

For example, while you might come here because you like (or don't like) me, it's not the same as if you're searching for info about buying a new coffee maker.  Because you couldn't care less who wrote about the coffee maker, or whether or not the article had any "personal flare."  You just want to get the best bang for your buck and the least amount of hassle when buying one, period.

In fact, for such an article, content geeks or "experts" are OVERKILL; classic examples of the "over-qualified."  I mean, sure we might listen to what Martha Stewart or Heloise have to say about coffee makers.  And if our stage of development is at the "needs to belong" stage, we might even buy their recommendations and happily sip our lattes while imagining a kinship with such celebrity "experts."  It's called "Oprahfication."  But great information about coffee makers can be found and published by anyone.  And that anyone (read: you and me!) can easily start making money by doing that right here (if nothing else, get the free PDF report).

"Human written articles WERE always the best kind of content, and with Article Underground, Michael has priced articles where it will put all other forms of content out of business! Finally, the "ban-proof" website can be built for a price anyone can afford. If you are doing Adsense or affiliate marketing, you don't dare pass this up, because I can assure you that many of your competitors will not."  Leslie Rohde

Article Underground doesn't spin articles for you.  It's just hands-down one of the best, most supportive, sites for running top-notch content sites that won't break your bank account.

But that's why an "article spinner" is such a threat to the content geeks. - the people who believe they are morally superior for having written all their content  from scratch.  A great article spinner can take an article and AUTOMATICALLY "spin" it into 100s of UNIQUE articles in a very short period of time.  And that will allow any content publisher to avoid potential "duplicate content" penalties from being assigned by Google.  And "spinning articles" is not being deceptive because it really IS no longer duplicate content.

The service I just signed on with not only spins your articles into 100s of articles automatically, but the pro version then posts a unique version to each of 407 article directories!  THAT'S 407 BACKLINKS with unique anchor text amidst unique relevant content.  Helloooooo?  Anybody home?

What's even better is that there is a FREE version that just spins the articles but the PRO version that submits them for you at a fraction of what I believe it should cost.   It's the same one that has been offered to members of Brad Fallon's $800/mo Stomper.net (and no, it's not even close to that much!).  But just think about it - a whopping 100s of unique versions of your articles published to 407 article submission sites avoiding Google's duplicate content penalty.  Just imagine what that can get you if you put it to use pointing to a FREE freshly monetized PLR blog on blogger.... or anything else you want.

But wait!  I WAS going to end this article right here until I just looked at my "back office."  And here is what I found...

"Add "For a unique version of this article" link? - This will add at the bottom of every article a link to allow anyone who uses your article to instantly spin their own unique variation of the article. This is extremely powerful as it allows for an unlimited number of potential article instances in Google as opposed to only having available the number of unique article spins that you have already submitted to directories or other resources.

Allow Public to View Spins - This will allow anyone to spin a new version of your article through the "Unique version of this article" link. It determines which pages are shown in your Public Article Repository."

Can we say, "Holy Cow!"?

I love this sort of thing.  It makes some otherwise very, very hard work, very, very easy.  In fact, I'm going to submit THIS article using it. ;-)

Darwin was right.  We can be nice to one another but when it comes to survival, it goes to the fittest.  And spinning articles that avoid Google's duplicate content penalties and get spun out to 407 article submission sites AUTOMATICALLY, providing 100s of unique backlinks to any site you want IS PRETTY DARN FIT.

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The #1 Coolest Guy on the Planet on Google AND Yahoo

From the desk of Sam Freedom, "The Coolest Guy on the Planet":

Forgive me while I gloat. It's something I do very rarely and never to the detriment of another. But in this case, it is because bragging rights were the goal in this good-natured contest between internet marketers (many of them self-proclaimed SEO experts.) And out of what seems like nowhere, this guy, this internet marketing demagogue sweeps past what must be about 4-5 dozen guys and takes 1st place in Yahoo and Google.

What's even more odd is if you check the winning site's backlinks, there are only 8. :-)

What does this mean? Hmm? Google doesn't honor "nofollow tags" in blog comments the way Yahoo has been, so it's not due to anything like Blogsubmitter PRO. So who can tell me? Whose on the same plane as Good Ol' Sam Freedom here...comment below if you have some wild and crazy thoughts as to why, with only a scant EIGHT backlinks, Sam Freedom outflanked 4-5 dozen prolific internet marketers (some SEO experts) and took the #1 spot in both Yahoo AND Google!

All along, I had really hoped Brad Callen had a good sense of humor because I'm a marketer who marches to the beat of a different drum and I really thought this one was pretty funny:

But then it got just a little bit funner...juuust a little bit. See, people were so curious about my Google ad that all their clicking on it earned it a spot in the top sponsors section and the end result looked something like this...

So, why do you think Sam Freedom has a #1 ranking in Google for a term competed for by top internet marketers with only 8 backlinks and surely less experience, right? And do you think Brad Callen has a healthy sense of humor?!

Until next time, best wishes.
Sincerely,
Sam
P.S. Free Membership to 4-Site Business Suite...Enjoy!!

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