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Have you ever wondered where Google's motto ... 'Don't be Evil' ... came from and have you ever really believed it? Well according to Michael Arrington, at TechCrunch, the motto originated with a Google employee way back in 2001 and even though Google claims that it's not really their motto it is displayed quite prominently on Google's Investor Relations page ... google.com/conduct.html.

And if you do believe it then I really feel very sorry for you because there's any number of examples I could point you to of Google doing a whole lot of evil. But don't feel too bad if you do believe it ... there are lots of other gullible people in the world who believe the same thing you do and I have a wonderful bridge that I can sell to every one of you.

Now it seems that even Google is getting a little tired of their unofficial motto and they would probably like to ditch it because even some of the very gullible are beginning to see that Google doesn't really stick to it. As recently as last week Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience was trying to distance the company from the motto but that's something that Google is unlikely to achieve.

Sure it may have been an unofficial motto but it's one that Google embraced when it suited Google to do so and now it's just too late for Google to be able to rid itself of those few words that imply so much but mean so little. Even if Google did ditch that motto can you imagine what the press would do?

Somehow, no matter how much spin their public relations staff generate in the coming years, I think that motto is going to come back to inflict a very serious bite on Google's collective ass.

One-stop blogging application
If you're one of those adult webmasters who are right into the blogging scene and dabble in Facebook too then you know what a hassle it can be when you want to make a post and have it automatically appear on several different sites at once ... basically you can't.

But now Six Apart have released a new Facebook application called 'Blog It' that will allow you to make a post to your Facebook page and then have it automatically replicated to multiple blogging services at the same time. And there might even be a chance that it will soon work with other content management systems besides those that run behind blogging software.

You've just got to love any application that allows you to work a whole lot smarter rather than harder and most adult webmasters will love it because it's free. Even though the application was developed by Six Apart the link to download it is actually over on their TypePad site ... typepad.com.

Free isn't always the best option
And while we're talking about software that helps you work smarter rather than harder let me tell you about an Optical Character Recognition program that we've been using. One of our mainstream clients wants to add numerous pages to the site we're developing for him that are currently only available in printed format. Each page contains a lot of text and our experiences with the some of the OEM OCR programs we've used in the past left us thinking that we were going to be tied down on this job for quite a while.

So we hunted around to see what others were recommending and finally decided to fork out some cash for AbbyFineReader and we're so pleased we did. It works and scanning all the pages that we have in front of us is going to be a breeze.

So don't be fooled into thinking that you can always get away with the free version of anything. As I've said before, with anything that's free you often get something that's worth exactly what you paid for it. Something that's free obviously isn't going to cost you anything up front but it certainly could cost you a lot of wasted time and a hell of a lot of frustration when you're trying to use it.

And that applies to whatever your situation might be. There are certainly some great applications out there for webmasters to use that don't cost a cent ... but there are also a heck of a lot of freebies out there that are just going to waste your time.

Another crazy day of work stretches before us so I'm off to jump into it. I hope your day is as productive as mine looks like being.