Twitter Influential but a Poor Driver of News Traffic
June 20, 2016
A recent report from social analytics firm Parse.ly examined the relationship between Twitter and digital publishers. NeimanLab shares a few details in, “Twitter Has Outsized Influence, but It Doesn’t Drive Much Traffic for Most News Orgs, a New Report Says.” Parse.ly tapped into data from a couple hundred of its clients, a group that includes digital publishers like Business Insider, the Daily Beast, Slate, and Upworthy.
Naturally, news sites that make the most of Twitter do so by knowing what their audience wants and supplying it. The study found there are two main types of Twitter news posts, conversational and breaking, and each drives traffic in its own way. While conversations can engage thousands of users over a period of time, breaking news produces traffic spikes.
Neither of those findings is unexpected, but some may be surprised that Twitter feeds are not inspiring more visits publishers’ sites. Writer Joseph Lichterman reports:
“Despite its conversational and breaking news value, Twitter remains a relatively small source of traffic for most publishers. According to Parse.ly, less than 5 percent of referrals in its network came from Twitter during January and February 2016. Twitter trails Facebook, Google, and even Yahoo as sources of traffic, the report said (though it does edge out Bing!)”
Still, publishers are unlikely to jettison their Twitter accounts anytime soon, because that platform offers a different sort of value. One that is, perhaps, more important for consumers. Lichterman quotes the report:
“Though Twitter may not be a huge overall source of traffic to news websites relative to Facebook and Google, it serves a unique place in the link economy. News really does ‘start’ on Twitter.”
And the earlier a news organization knows about a situation, the better. That is an advantage few publishers will want to relinquish.
Cynthia Murrell, June 20, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Google Knowledge Vault Claimed to Be the Future
May 31, 2016
Back in 2014, I heard rumors that the Google Knowledge Vault was supposed to be the next wave of search. How many times do you hear a company or a product making the claim it is the next big thing? After I rolled my eyes, I decided to research what became of the Knowledge Vault and I found an old article from Search Engine Land: “Google ‘Knowledge Vault’ To Power Future Of Search.” Google Knowledge Graph was used to supply more information to search results, what we now recognize as the summarized information at the top of Google search results. The Knowledge Vault was supposedly the successor and would rely less on third party information providers.
“Sensationally characterized as ‘the largest store of knowledge in human history,’ Knowledge Vault is being assembled from content across the Internet without human editorial involvement. ‘Knowledge Vault autonomously gathers and merges information from across the web into a single base of facts about the world, and the people and objects in it,’ says New Scientist. Google has reportedly assembled 1.6 billion “facts” and scored them according to confidence in their accuracy. Roughly 16 percent of the information in the database qualifies as ‘confident facts.’”
Knowledge Vault was also supposed to give Google a one up in the mobile search market and even be the basis for artificial intelligence applications. It was a lot of hoopla, but I did a bit more research and learned from Wikipedia that Knowledge Vault was nothing more than a research paper.
Since 2014, Google, Apple, Facebook, and other tech companies have concentrated their efforts and resources on developing artificial intelligence and integrating it within their products. While Knowledge Vault was a red herring, the predictions about artificial intelligence were correct.
Whitney Grace, May 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
DGraph Labs Startup Aims to Fill Gap in Graph Database Market
May 24, 2016
The article on GlobeNewsWire titled Ex-Googler Startup DGraph Labs Raises US$1.1 Million in Seed Funding Round to Build Industry’s First Open Source, Native and Distributed Graph Database names Bain Capital Ventures and Blackbird Ventures as the main investors in the startup. Manish Jain, founder and CEO of DGraph, worked on Google’s Knowledge Graph Infrastructure for six years. He explains the technology,
“Graph data structures store objects and the relationships between them. In these data structures, the relationship is as important as the object. Graph databases are, therefore, designed to store the relationships as first class citizens… Accessing those connections is an efficient, constant-time operation that allows you to traverse millions of objects quickly. Many companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, LinkedIn and Dropbox use graph databases to power their smart search engines and newsfeeds.”
Among the many applications of graph databases, the internet of thing, behavior analysis, medical and DNA research, and AI are included. So what is DGraph going to do with their fresh funds? Jain wants to focus on forging a talented team of engineers and developing the company’s core technology. He notes in the article that this sort of work is hardly the typical obstacle faced by a startup, but rather the focus of major tech companies like Google or Facebook.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 24, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Removes Pirate Links
April 21, 2016
A few weeks ago, YouTube was abuzz with discontent from some of its most popular YouTube stars. Their channels had been shut down die to copyright claims by third parties, even thought the content in question fell under the Fair Use defense. YouTube is not the only one who has to deal with copyright claims. TorrentFreak reports that “Google Asked To Remove 100,000 ‘Pirate Links’ Every Hour.”
Google handles on average two million DMCA takedown notices from copyright holders about pirated content. TorrentFreak discovered that the number has doubled since 2015 and quadrupled since 2014. The amount beats down to one hundred thousand per hour. If the rate continues it will deal with one billion DMCA notices this year, while it had previously taken a decade to reach this number.
“While not all takedown requests are accurate, the majority of the reported links are. As a result many popular pirate sites are now less visible in Google’s search results, since Google downranks sites for which it receives a high number of takedown requests. In a submission to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator a few months ago Google stated that the continued removal surge doesn’t influence its takedown speeds.”
Google does not take broad sweeping actions, such as removing entire domain names from search indexes, as it does not want to become a censorship board. The copyright holders, though, are angry and want Google to promote only legal services over the hundreds of thousands of Web sites that pop up with illegal content. The battle is compared to an endless whack-a-mole game.
Pirated content does harm the economy, but the numbers are far less than how the huge copyright holders claim. The smaller people who launch DMCA takedowns, they are hurt more. YouTube stars, on the other hand, are the butt of an unfunny joke and it would be wise for rules to be revised.
Whitney Grace, April 21, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Tumblr Tumbles, Marking yet Another Poor Investment Decision by Yahoo
April 14, 2016
The article on VentureBeat titled As Tumblr’s Value Head to Zero, a Look at Where It Ranks Among Yahoo’s 5 Worst Acquisition Deals pokes fun at Yahoo’s tendency to spend huge amounts of cash for companies only to watch them immediately fizzle. In the number one slot is Broadcast.com. Remember that? Me neither. But apparently Yahoo doled out almost $6B in 1999 to wade into the online content streaming game only to shut the company down after a few years. And thusly, we have Mark Cuban. Thanks Yahoo. The article goes on with the ranking,
“2. GeoCities: Yahoo paid $3.6 billion for this dandy that let people who knew nothing about the Web make web pages. Fortunately, this was also mostly shut down, and nearly all of its content vanished, saving most of us from a lot GIF-induced embarrassment. 3. Overture: Yahoo paid $1.63 billion in 2003 for this search engine firm after belatedly realizing that some upstart called Google was eating its lunch. Spoiler alert: Google won.”
The article suggests that Tumblr would slide into fourth place given the $1.1B price tag and two year crash and burn. It also capitulates that there are other ways of measuring this list, such as: levels of hard to watch. By that metric, cheaper deals with more obvious mismanagement like the social sites Flickr or Delicious might take the cake.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Missing Twitter Manual Located
April 7, 2016
Once more we turn to the Fuzzy Notepad’s advice and their Pokémon mascot, Evee. This time we visited the fuzz pad for tips on Twitter. The 140-character social media platform has a slew of hidden features that do not have a button on the user interface. Check out “Twitter’s Missing Manual” to read more about these tricks.
It is inconceivable for every feature to have a shortcut on the user interface. Twitter relies on its users to understand basic features, while the experienced user will have picked up tricks that only come with experience or reading tips on the Internet. The problem is:
“The hard part is striking a balance. On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. On the other end you have tools like vim, which consist exclusively of easter eggs.
One of Twitter’s problems is that it’s tilted a little too far towards the vim end of the scale. It looks like a dead-simple service, but those humble 140 characters have been crammed full of features over the years, and the ways they interact aren’t always obvious. There are rules, and the rules generally make sense once you know them, but it’s also really easy to overlook them.”
Twitter is a great social media platform, but a headache to use because it never came with an owner’s manual. Fuzzy notepad has lined up hint for every conceivable problem, including the elusive advanced search page.
Whitney Grace, April 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Nasdaq Joins the Party for Investing in Intelligence
April 6, 2016
The financial sector is hungry for intelligence to help curb abuses in capital markets, judging by recent actions of Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. Nasdaq invests in ‘cognitive’ technology, from BA wire, announces their investment in Digital Reasoning. Nasdaq plans to connect Digital Reasoning algorithms with Nasdaq’s technology which surveils trade data. The article explains the benefits of joining these two products,
“The two companies want to pair Digital Reasoning software of unstructured data such as voicemail, email, chats and social media, with Nasdaq’s Smarts business, which is one of the foremost software for monitoring trading on global markets. It is used by more than 40 markets and 12 regulators. Combining the two products is designed to assess the context, content and relationships behind trading and spot signals that could indicate insider trading, market manipulation or even expenses rules violations.”
We have followed Digital Reasoning, and other intel vendors like them, for quite some time as they target sectors ranging from healthcare to law to military. This is just a case of another software intelligence vendor making the shift to the financial sector. Following the money appears to be the name of the game.
Megan Feil, April 6, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Slack Hires Noah Weiss
March 29, 2016
One thing you can always count on the tech industry is talent will jump from company to company to pursue the best and most innovating endeavors. The latest tech work to jump ship is Eric Weiss, he leaps from Foursquare to head a new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group at Slack. VentureBeat reports the story in “Slack Forms Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group On ‘Mining The Chat Corpus.’” Slack is a team communication app and their new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group will be located in the app’s new New York office.
Weiss commented on the endeavor:
“ ‘The focus is on building features that make Slack better the bigger a company is and the more it uses Slack,” Weiss wrote today in a Medium post. “The success of the group will be measured in how much more productive, informed, and collaborative Slack users get — whether a company has 10, 100, or 10,000 people.’”
For the new group, Weiss wants to hire experts who are talented in the fields of artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and natural language processing. From this talent search, he might be working on a project that will help users to find specific information in Slack or perhaps they will work on mining the chap corpus.
Other tech companies have done the same. Snapchat built a research team that uses artificial intelligence to analyze user content. Flipboard and Pinterest are working on new image recognition technology. Meanwhile Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Microsoft are working on their own artificial intelligence projects.
What will artificial intelligence develop into as more companies work on their secret projects.
Whitney Grace, March 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Social Media Still a Crime Hub
March 14, 2016
It seems that most crime is concentrated on the hidden Dark Web, especially with news of identity thief and potential threats to national security making the news over the latest social media hotspot. Social media is still a hot bed for Internet crime and Motherboard has a little tale tell about, “SocioSpyder: The Tool Bought By The FBI To Monitor Social Media.” Social media remains a popular crime hub, because of the amount of the general public that use it making them susceptible to everything from terroristic propaganda to the latest scam to steal credit card numbers.
Law enforcement officials are well aware of how criminals use social media, but the biggest problem is having to sift through the large data stockpile from the various social media platforms. While some law enforcement officials might enjoy watching the latest cute kitten video, it is not a conducive use of their time. The FBI purchased SocioSpyder as their big data tool.
“ ‘SocioSpyder,’ as the product is called, ‘can be configured to collect posts, tweets, videos and chats on-demand or autonomously into a relational, searchable and graphable database,” according to the product’s website. SocioSpyder is made by Allied Associates International, a US-based contractor for government and military clients as well as other private companies, and which sells, amongst other things, software.
This particular piece of kit, which is only sold to law enforcement or intelligence agencies, allows an analyst to not only keep tabs on many different targets across various social networks at once, but also easily download all of the data and store it. In short, it’s pretty much a pre-configured web scraper for social media.”
SocioSpyder maps relationships within the data and understand how the user-generated content adds up to the bigger picture. Reportedly, the FBI spent $78,000 on the SocioSpyder software and the US Marshals bought a lesser version worth $22,500. SocioSpyder is being used to gather incriminating evidence against criminals and avoid potential crimes.
My biggest question: where can we get a version of SocioSpyder to generate reports for personal use?
Whitney Grace, March 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
No Evidence That Terrorists Are Using Bitcoin
February 23, 2016
If you were concerned virtual currencies like Bitcoin are making things easier for Islamic State (aka IS, ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh), you can rest easy, at least for now. The International Business Times reports, “Isis: Bitcoin Not Used by Daesh.” That is the conclusion reached by a Europol investigation performed after last November’s attacks in Paris. Though some had suggested the terrorists were being funded with cyber money, investigators found no evidence of it.
On the other hand, the organization’s communication networks are thriving online through the Dark Web and a variety of apps. Writer Alistair Charlton tells us:
Better known by European law enforcement is how terrorists like IS use social media to communicate. The report says: “The internet and social media are used for communication and the acquisition of goods (weapons, fake IDs) and services, made relatively safe for terrorists with the availability of secure and inherently encrypted appliances, such as WhatsApp, Skype and Viber. In Facebook, VKA and Twitter they join closed and hidden groups that can be accessed by invitation only, and use coded language.”
se of Tor, the anonymising browser used to access the dark web where sites are hidden from search engines like Google, is also acknowledged by Europol. “The use of encryption and anonymising tools prevent conventional observation by security authorities. There is evidence of a level of technical knowledge available to religiously inspired terrorist groups, allowing them to make their use of the internet and social media invisible to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.”
Of course, like any valuable technology, anonymizing apps can be used for weal or woe; they benefit marginalized peoples trying to make their voices heard as much as they do terrorists. Besides, there is no going back to a disconnected world now. My question is whether terrorists have taken the suggestion, and are now working on a Bitcoin initiative. I suppose we will see, eventually.
Cynthia Murrell, February 23, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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