Stories, opinions, life, the universe and everything

You may not agree. You may think that I am stark-staring-mad. That's OK. I sincerely hope I am!

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I started the novel with alcohol-fuelled excitement...

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And in the beginning there was Facebook. After a few years and lots of fish-feeding, farm building, netting several billion bucks it is a fine example of the 'todally friv'lus'. Corporations love facebook. Lots of customers there. Plenty of embarrasing pictures of binge drinking, funny videos and personal secrets published that you never thought anyone but the last divorce/separation subject could possibly know. Oh damn!
Google+ invited and encouraged a mass migration of techies and geeks intent on inviting only techies and geeks to discuss the latest IPhone specs and pore over pie charts, scheduling statistics and +1'ing anything from/about Steve Jobs and how Apple is going to survive without the enfent terrible. Oh damn!
Twitter tweets on like a basket of budgies in 120 characters or less chronicling the careers of everyone from Lindsay Lohan to Amy Winehouse, while creative writers concoct novels in the tweetscape in textspeak. Oh damn!
YouTube. No comment necessary. Oh damn!
Goldurn it! It's all free! Todally free. Of course if you're not on one or more of them, managing a million 'friends,' you just don't exist. And if you don't exist, you're not a consumer. Just about every facebook user knows that once you're in, it's darn near impossible to get out. Hotel California was not a song, it was a prophecy.
Then there's Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, International day of the Baby Boomers, Noddy's Birthday, when you wake up all prettily packaged and can't understand why your mailbox is full of exhortations to buy the very thing you were just talking about yesterday with all your buddies. Wow! How magic is that? And they're just so NICE! Hello sexypants, your friend ironcrotchbob wants to share the very latest ubeaut camera you can use in the bath! Take advantage of this very special Just for you only today special offer, and we'll give you todally free a kilo of smelly bath salts! And how do you get this special only for you once in a lifetime offer? Just click the 'like' button and all ten million friends will be inundated with junk mail. Allow the company to access all your personal private details, (you don't know, or don't care about how to protect your privacy in your settings), and hey presto you've just contributed another billion bucks to the coffers of your favourite social networking service. Oh damn!.
Ever heard of Diaspora? Sounds like some kind of fungus infection between your toes doesn't it? "Urk! s/he's got Diaspora! Better keep away, it might be infectious!".
Diaspora? Hmm! 'di·as·po·ra/dīˈaspərə/Noun: Jews living outside Israel.
The dispersion of the Jews beyond Israel. The main diaspora began in the 8th–6th centuries bc, and even before the sack of Jerusalem..' What? Ohhhh! really..?
The term originally meant 'dispersion of Jews outside their homeland.'
" Now, it means 'a dispersion of any people from their homeland' & the community formed by such a people. It means ' a dispersion of an originally homogeneousentity such as language or culture.
Eg: African Diaspora in America
2.Indian Diaspora in Britain
Source(s):
Source:
The Free Dictionary By Farlex"
Oh I know what you're saying. "What's this dingbat blabbering on about? Who cares about a bunch of folks being dispersed from their homeland? Bit too socio-political huh? Socio-political? What's that when it's wheels are turning? Duh!
Well, I got an invite from a mate who finally got jack of emptying his spam that seemed strangely to be dribblling out of his spam filter into his inbox, apparently for no reason at all. Oh damn!

Diaspora now has a new definition. The dispersion of any people from social networks in which users are products for sale to business for massive fees, to resettlement in a community formed by such people. Diaspora is a privacy heavy social network where the community is free to communicate to develop its own self worth." Hot damn! I like that!

I was trying to work yesterday when I met a minor character who began to intrigue me. Initially she was a stereotypical dumb blonde whose life, it seems is defined by her strange vocabulary and her ability to text at extraordinary speeds. Her consistently high results in school have led her to serious conflict and arguments with her parents who have no reason to believe that she will ever come to anything. " You can't cut and paste your way through life!" Her dad rants. "It's cheating dear." Her mum agrees. "They say Angelina has MS."
"Oh mum!" Exclaims our little dumb blonde. "Well she must have something!" Mum pouts. "New Idea can't say it if it isn't true. AND it's on the " front page of the Sun" "Muuuum!" our LDB exclaims, updating her FB at lightning speed!
"Listen to your mother!" dad rages! "She's got O levels in domestic sciece and shorthand"
"90 words a minute for my shorthand." Mum preens, and I invented baked bean soup."
"Mum, you added water because the can of beans was burning, and then threw in the toast when you burnt that too. We've been eating your O level domestic science since I was born! Oh, and I text at 170. That's just another shorthand entitity."

Our LDB is studying English Lit and lang, archeology, forensics and law.
"And where do YOU get all your information?" Dad rages, holding up two fingers to bracket 'information'.
It turns out that LDB has an eidetic memory. "What's that when it's not in it's cage?" (Dad is the sarcastic type.) " From the web." LDB says explaining that her memory is eidetic. "Well there you are!" (Dad is smug.) "Cut and paste off of the internet!"
" I don't cut and paste. I remember. I remember everything I read or see. It's quite rare actually."
"Well," scowls dad, "Idiotic memory or not it's still cheating! What's all this stupid unfriending then?" Using the finger brackets again. " How can you unfriend someone?"
LDB makes some comment about 'off of' and returns the finger tweaking bracketing. She explains that unfriend is actually a 17th century word, well before internet times. She goes on to suggest that sms and texting 'shorthand' also predates the internet. LOL shows up in letters from the fifties and sixties as meaning Little Old Lady. OMGG was noted from letters in the first world war to mean Oh My Goodness Gracious, and of course letters were often SWALK, Sealed With A Loving Kiss.

And so a small humourous moment in a very serious novel. Introduced me to a young lady whom I had intended to be no more than a deep breath after a harrowing incident.


So FYI there is not much new under the sun as the say. Maybe it would be a worthwhile project to create a new DICTIONARY OF INTERNET ENGLISH. To the best of my knowledge no one has done it. So, please share and comment, and when you do, please please make your own contribution. Mine today is UNFRIEND (verb) to remove someone from your list of friends on a social networking page.


More please. Many many more. Internet slang accepted. LOL, (Just FYI)

I've long researched and ranted against Content Farms, The "information" on these sites is at best highly questionable, and at worst dangerous. Imagine searching for information on your health problems and coming across a professional looking site replete with "advice" about your symptoms, and medications. These sites are legal, show up in top Google rankings, (they always find a way to rank in spite of Google trying to stop it,) and there are now not just hundreds, but thousands of these 'shady' sites. TRIOND alone based in Israel and calling itself a "publishing company" has hundreds. They use Google Adsense to provide income to the "writers". They do not pay for articles, nor are any of the articles "tested". I have been calling for content farms to be forced to place a banner disclaimer stating that the site is exactly that, a CONTENT FARM.
Notwithstanding the fact that one of my own sites has constantly been refused an adsense account (any site I own linked to a particular email address is refused in spite of the fact that my sites are full of totally original content written by me and copyright owned by me, it irks me that Google still cannot address the problem.) It's not hard! Just identify the sites as content farms in the search results. As a professional writer producing well researched articles based on accurate information I can no longer make an income from original material. Within hours of posting an article which may have taken hours, or days to write and cross-check, my work appears on CONTENT FARMS spun to the point of nonsense and complete inaccuracy. "Spun" mostly by non English speakers in India, Nigeria, China, Russia, (the list goes on.) Just one of my articles can be "spun" millions of times, and posted on content farms, they might make the "writer" a fabulous $10 a month, but in (say) Vietnam, where the annual income is about $1000 a year that's a whole heap of lolly. In recent years companies have sprung up that purchase articles. These companies then post the nonsense on hundreds of sites, and reap the Google adsense cash. (This has caused me to cancel my adwords account, since I found that my ads appear on content farms and because I am not a big advertiser I don't really get much choice about placement. Imagine one of my ads generating thousands of 'hits' and not a single sale. The stats look good on my account of course, but the 'clickers' have no intention of buying anything. How much do the companies buying articles pay? The majority pay $3 for a 600 word article with a minimum of 5 articles. 3000 words for $15! Article spinning software, article writing software is cheap, and it really doesn't matter if you can't speak English so long as the articles can pass Copyscape scrutiny.
Let me show you an email I received today (links removed). Oh, before I do that, I can't see why Google can't just provide a small piece of information in their search stating THIS SITE CONTAINS FARMED CONTENT. No complex algorithms required. They know who these sites are, so why not INFORM THE PUBLIC. Anyway, the email I received today from one of the most successful "marketers". I have NO animosity towards this company, and what they do is not illegal even though they sell a product that can take THIS article, spin it a few thousand times, and plug it into one of the thousands of content farms to reap the Google Adsense 'rewards. It can even be "spun" in such a way that these words become a promotional article in favour of content farms! That's more scary than having my income reduced to almost zero. DISCLAIMER: Links in this article are NOT intended to promote any product or service. They are provided ONLY for information related to this article.
Graham, never write another article again!

Hi Graham,

What if you could punch a button and get a new article
every time, an article that would ALWAYS be AT LEAST
75% unique from every other article ever produced
when you hit that button?

And what if each article produced was HIGH quality,
human-edited, and about 500 words long?

You could post fresh content to your blogs, get TONS
of backlinks to your site (all on highly unique pages
of content), get traffic from article directories
and web 2.0 properties -- you name it.

Wow, what a benefit THAT would be!

Even if you prefer to write 100% of the content
on your "money" sites, there's no sense in spending
that kind of time on content you need for building
links to rank in Google -- not if you could get
a quality push-button article in seconds!

This is not a fantasy, Graham. I've got a tool
that lets you do JUST THAT.

It's called a "Super Spun" article. It's a 100%
human-edited (every word) document that is built
around of a series of complementary articles.

This is how a Super Spun article is produced:

1. Ten high quality, 500+ word, complementary
articles are created.

2. Each article title is rewritten 10 times
(100 titles total).

3. Each paragraph of each article is rewritten
10 times.

4. Every sentence of all resulting paragraphs is
rewritten 10 times.

5. All of the titles and sentences are checked
for quality by a team of skilled Editors --
every single word.

6. The titles, paragraphs and sentences are put
together into a spin-formatted document.

Do you know how many HIGH QUALITY article variations
these documents are capable of producing?

Hold your breath, Graham, because it's:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

In math terms, that's one nonillion (or, for
European mathematicians, one quintillion). I
can't even begin to comprehend how large that
number is.

THAT'S the number of article variations you can get
from ONE of my Super Spun articles.

Ready to take a look? I have to warn you, I don't
have very many available right now. These suckers
require a SERIOUS amount of work. But I'm eager
to have you take a look, so here's the link:

LINK REMOVED BY AUTHOR
(After reading the information on the page, click
the "VIEW INVENTORY" link at the bottom to see
what's available.)


*** WHAT ABOUT DUPLICATE CONTENT? ***

So a Super Spun Article can generate a bazillion
variations. So what? As an Internet Marketer
or Search Engine Marketer, what you're probably
interested in is duplicate content, not variations.

Let's talk about duplicate content, then.

A typical Super Spun Article has 30 sentences in
it. The odds of any two articles generated from
the Super Spun document having one sentence in
common is one in one hundred, or one percent.

One sentence out of 30 is a little more than 3%
of the content. That means that for every one
hundred articles generated from the Super Spun
document, the odds are that two of them will
have 3% duplicate content. That's certainly a
number that the search engines, can live with.

The odds of any two articles having two sentences
in common is one in one thousand. So for every
one thousand articles generated from the Super Spun
document, two will have about 6.5% duplicate content.

Still a fabulously small amount in the eyes of the
search engines.

Three sentences in common (roughly 10% duplicate
content)? One in ten thousand.

Four (~13%)? One in a hundred thousand.

Five (~17%)? One in a million.

So a high percentage of duplicate content really
isn't a problem with Super Spun documents.

Ready to take a look now? Here's the link again:
LINK REMOVED BY AUTHOR
(After reading the information on the page, click
the "VIEW INVENTORY" link at the bottom to see
what's available.)


*** HOW ABOUT COPYSCAPE? ***

Ah, yes, Copyscape. The Holy Grail of unique
content in most marketers' eyes is having Copyscape
come back with "No results found." If you achieve
that, your dreams come true....

So how well will articles generated from Super Spun
documents perform in Copyscape? Very, very well, but
not perfect (and they don't have to be perfect).

As outlined already, there's a 1% chance of any two
generated articles sharing about 3% of content.
Copyscape will find that 3% if it's on a page
indexed in Google somewhere.

In completely practical terms, after a Super Spun
article is used hundreds or thousands of times,
Copyscape will probably locate a variety of documents
that match one, maybe two sentences topping out at
about 15% of what Copyscape thinks is "duplicate"
content. (The duplicated sentences will rarely be
the same in the documents Copyscape finds.)

The actual duplicate content will likely be less
than 10%, but Copyscape will throw false positives,
claiming that a few common phrases that happen to
be in both articles are also "duplicates" and
adding that to its total percentage.

But even if there was genuinely 15 full percent
of duplicated content between the two articles,
that is seriously within the comfort zone of the
search engines.

I don't speak for Google, of course, but it's
been my experience that even 30% of duplicated
content is not a problem -- and the chance of
there ever being 30% duplication between two
Super Spun article generations is so small as
to be virtually impossible (the odds are about
one in ten billion).


*** WANT TO SEE SOME EXAMPLE ARTICLES? ***

I wouldn't expect you to believe my claims of
high quality without being able to see some
sample articles output by the Super Spun
documents, of course.

So hop on over to the site, read more about
how the documents work (if you want to),
and then click the "VIEW INVENTORY" link at
the bottom of the page.

Next to each available Super Spun article is
a link to view two samples generated by that
document. I think you'll like what you see.

Here's the link one more time:
LINK REMOVED BY AUTHOR