Pre-fab online presence

Have you noticed those manipulative Facebook posts, "like" if you hate cancer and so forth? It seems that the more "likes" your posts receive, the higher your EdgeRank. What is EdgeRank you ask?

EdgeRank is an algorithm developed by Facebook to govern what is displayed—and how high—on the News Feed.

Just because someone has "friended" you, it does not follow that you will get to see their posts. Facebook has a complicated algorithim that decides what goes into your feed. You don't see all the material that has been posted by your friends and the pages you have "liked." Facebook, not you, decides what you really like.

So, if you want to build a page with a very high EdgeRank, you post manipulative posts asking readers to support a cure for cancer.

All about those Facebook "like" scam posts

Businesses worldwide are trying to figure out how to best utilise platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus (haha, na I’m just kidding about Google Plus). They know that EdgeRank, likes, brand exposure and followers are important, even if they don’t know exactly why or what to do with it.

So a social media consultant manufactures a page with a high edgerank and sells it to some business who wants a page with high EdgeRank, but does not know how to build it. You know what would be cheaper and more effective than buying a pre-fab fan page from a social media consultant? Building a page on Facebook, putting interesting content on that page, and then buying advertising from Facebook to generate traffic, and ultimately EdgeRank. Sometimes paying the Facebook toll is the superior solution.

New to me local public affairs blog

BLACK VECTOR – Ideas For A New Direction For Public Affairs

Command? Or watering hole?

Inside the Cyber Command Turf Battle

Reports by the Associated Press who obtained a memo on the subject said this week the Pentagon delayed and may even kill the Air Force's planned Cyberspace Command. Why exactly is up for speculation, but according to one insider who absolutely did not want to be identified - "It's a dollar Grab".

The insider went on to say that "with an estimated $30 billion being spent on cyber capabilities, who can blame them?"

As I tally it, the Army, Air Force, CIA, NSA, DIA, DHS, StratCom and two unidentified black-ops units have already begun developing cyber warfare capabilities. Anyone with an ounce of sense would not want to get in the middle of that group! The Pentagon has to be thinking it would be better to have one unified cyber command rather than all these dispirit efforts.

Cyber warfare is a highly desirable command area -- it is new, it's exciting, it's a real threat and arguably the hottest topic in military circles. Multiple security experts, including myself, have warned that significant and very special resources and expertise are required to execute the core elements of the Bush administration's cyber security plan.

Unified command? Or one isolated silo that only meets the needs of one service? And would one unified command promote the idea of information sharing so central to security?

Edit Comment on Schneier blog reacts to the news:

Russia vs. Georgia-Poland-Estonia are nothing when compared with AF vs. DHS? :-)

Military cyber and electronic security

TaoSecurity

Since we're talking military cyber operations, a blog reader asked for my opinion of the new story U.S. Army challenges USAF on network warfare. I saw this first hand at a cyber conference recently. The Air Force colonel who will be vice commander of Cyber Command, Tony Buntyn, spoke, followed by an Army colonel, John Blaine, from NetCom. Col Blaine said the Army had been doing cyber operations for years, seemingly in contrast to the "new" Air Force Cyber Command. Of course, my previous history post noted that the Air Force Information Warfare Center was established in 1993, and the AFCERT was created the year earlier. Air Force cyber history is very extensive, especially if you expand to electronic warfare in Vietnam.