With sites like Linked In, MySpace, Facebook and other social media sites, this one could prove to be a winner in helping you raise your ranking a little in the search engines. And it also makes it easier for you to be found.

The How To:

If you don’t have already have a google ‘gmail’ account, then you’ll need to get one. Goto mail.google.com and sign up for a free account. Currently gmail accounts offers 7gb of free storage space so you have ample space to store lots of email. Simply provide google with the information it requires, providing a valid email address and you should be setup within a matter of minutes.

Once you’ve created your gmail account, then goto http://profiles.google.com and follow the instructions. The more information you provide the better the chances you’ll show up at the bottom of page one when someone types in your name. Be sure to verify your email account, once you’ve entered in your information into your profile.

To see my profile Click Here

A New Search Engine Debuts

Wolfram Alpha is backed by Stephen Wolfram, the noted scientist and author behind the Mathematica computational software and the book, A New Kind Of Science. I don’t know much about the software but in my computer selling days, I sold this program by the truckloads to schools. So their just might be something to it.

You should bookmark this site now. http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Taken from their blog.

Although it’s tempting to think of Wolfram|Alpha as a place to look up facts, that’s only part of the story. The thing that truly sets Wolfram|Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories.

Why does computation matter? Because computation is what turns generic information into specific answers.

To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute. If you ask Wolfram|Alpha the distance to the moon, it tells you not only the conventionally quoted average distance, but also the actual distance right now, which can at times be well over ten thousand miles off the average. The actual distance is a figure that can be arrived at only by computation based on the moon’s known orbital parameters. It’s rocket science, if you will.

“While search engines like Google, by and large, find things that already exist on the Internet—Web sites, photos, videos, blogs—Wolfram|Alpha answers questions, often by doing complex, and new computations.” —From The New York Times Bits blog
Looking for the gross domestic product of a country, say France? Wolfram Alpha’s got that:

Want to see the GDP of France?

Well, I for one am interested in seeing this in action.

An to appease the geek in me… here is a video showing the setup of some racks.