Mediaboss Marketing

Day one at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Search Engine Marketing Associations State of Search conference was a full day: ten sessions plus a morning keynote by Marty Weintraub, Founder of AimClear. Tracks included SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Local SEO. Below is a brief round-up of some of the sessions I had the opportunity to attend today.

Marty revved up the crowd by going through classic social myths that many of us (and our clients or employees) believe when it comes to not implementing social media.

Some of these included:

Marty also discussed the fact that its crucial for businesses to be on Google+ because profiles rank in Google, social signals count for SEO, and more social media connections equals more visibility in search.

Social media is useful for any industry and any company. It can be used for community building, avoiding damage to business (by responding to negative feedback), sales, and customer support.

In order to get started with social media, Marty recommended the following steps:

Phil Rozek did a session on the fact that what users click and (as well as their exit pages and conversion actions) influence your local Google rank. He told the audience we should assume two things:

Assumption 1: Google knows everything Assumption 2: Google judges everything

Google looks at user behavior (e.g. what toys the kids are playing with most in the playground) to determine rank. So this brings us to the $64k question: How can you get users to show Google youre a good search result?

The answer/goal: To collect more clicks from all over (all types). Forget rankings, you should be doing these things anyway.

Originally posted here:
User Behavior, SEO Audits, Social Media: #StateofSearch 2014 Day One Recap by @wonderwall7

Daniel C Peterson: Unnecessary Censorship
Daniel C. Peterson: Unnecessary Censorship. Purely for entertainment purposes and intending no ill-will. Just a fun take on Jimmy Kimmel #39;s Unnecessary Censorship series -- Mormon style.

By: ExMormon Reddit

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Daniel C Peterson: Unnecessary Censorship - Video

16 hours ago by Emiliano De Cristofaro, The Conversation In Syria everything coming in, and everything going out is watched. momente/Shutterstock

Norwegian writer Mette Newth once wrote that: "censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history." As we develop new means to gather and create information, new means to control, erase and censor that information evolve alongside it. Today that means access to information through the internet, which motivates us to study internet censorship.

Organisations such as Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, or the Open Net Initiative periodically report on the extent of censorship worldwide. But as countries that are fond of censorship are not particularly keen to share details, we must resort to probing filtered networks, that is, generating requests from within them to see what gets blocked and what gets through. We cannot hope to record all the possible censorship-triggering events, so our understanding of what is or isn't acceptable to the censor will only ever be partial. And of course it's risky, even outright illegal, to probe the censor's limits within countries with strict censorship and surveillance programs.

This is why the leak of 600GB of logs from hardware appliances used to filter internet traffic in and out of Syria is a unique opportunity to examine the workings of a real-world internet censorship apparatus.

Leaked by the hacktivist group Telecomix, the logs cover a period of nine days in 2011, drawn from seven SG-9000 internet proxies. The sale of equipment like this to countries like Syria is banned by the US and EU. California-based manufacturer Blue Coat Systems denied making the sales but confirmed the authenticity of the logs and Dubai-based firm Computerlinks FZCO later settled on a US$2.8m fine for unlawful export. In 2013, researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab demonstrated how authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Egypt and Kuwait all rely on US-made equipment like those from Blue Coat or McAfee's SmartFilter software to perform filtering.

This technology is extremely powerful as it can perform deep-packet inspection, that is, examining in detail the contents of network traffic. They provide censors with a simple interface to fine-tune filtering policies, practically in real time.

Inside a censor's mind

At the recent ACM Internet Measurement Conference we presented our paper detailing the relatively stealthy but targeted censorship system that we'd found from examining the logs.

Internet traffic in Syria was filtered in several ways. IP addresses (the unique addresses of web servers on the internet) and domain names (the URL typed into the address bar) were filtered to block single websites such as badoo.com or amazon.com, entire network regions (including a few Israeli subnets), or keywords to target specific content. Instant messaging, tools such as Skype, and content-sharing sites such as Metacafe or Reddit were heavily censored. Social media censoring was limited to specific content and pages, such as the "Syrian Revolution" facebook page.

The appliances were sometimes misconfigured, meaning the filter caused some collateral damage for instance, all requests with the keyword "proxy" were blocked, probably in an effort to curb the use of censorship-evading proxies, but this also had the effect of blocking adverts and certain plug-ins that had no relation to banned content.

Originally posted here:
Lessons on censorship from Syria's internet filter machines

Implementing a filter

Media reports say ministers will ask all Internet service providers (ISPs) to block pornography sites, a daunting mission given the sheer number of them floating online. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) puts the figure at 40 million, the majority of which are located outside India. Experts are skeptical that officials lack the capability to strictly enforce the censorship.

Read MoreMore opponents ofInternet regulation emerge

"Despite India's IT sector making tremendous progress, authorities remain ill-equipped to enforce the ban, particularly in terms of digital forensics and also the numerous websites that the banned ones may spawn," said Gateway House's Patil.

Moreover, access to blocked portals will still be possible, Duggal noted, as people will turn to a variety of indirect methods, including proxy servers, to bypass filters. One example of this is the torrent website 'The Pirate Bay,' which is banned on over 20 countries but remains accessible via multiple proxy servers.

So, will India embrace a Chinese-style censorship police to enforce the ban? The Communist country employs one of the world's most rigorous content-filtering Internet systems, including the 'Great Firewall of China,' a large-scale surveillance network that can block websites containing taboo keywords such as Tiananmen, Tibet or Falun Gong.

Read MoreUS pollution data on Beijing blocked on mobile app

"As a whole, India is a very systemic country, it's not like anything cannot be blocked," Duggal told CNBC. "The chances of a Chinese experiment being replicated in India are extremely low given our robust constitution."

Read more:
India to ban porn - will it work?

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