Social media and the gory, disgusting scenes

At around a little after midnight, I was idly going through my Facebook page when my eyes fell on this most grotesque picture of five burned bodies with a caption in a language I could not read. I almost vomited. 
Who would put such a shot without warning and have we all taken leave of our sense that we have said yes to strangers to post on our site with ‘shock’ value visuals that even children can see.
Interspersed with people sitting in business class aircraft seats sipping champagne or sharing their view from some benighted hotel in some Shangri La is a picture of a dead Qandeel Baloch, the Pakistani women’s lib icon who was murdered by an unrepentant brother. Is there no privacy left?
And why does anyone think it is valid to take a close up of a dead body and shove it on the Internet. Death has become so staple a diet on social platforms that it has almost become blah, like here are a dozen grotesque corpses in living color, enjoy. And there are 3.2k likes.
Death in all its mutilation is not banal. It is psychologically devastating. A Michigan university study showed that blood and gore in films leave an impact on children. Imagine then how much more it must bruise the mind when it is through the intimacy of the Internet.
A study in 2014 in Germany and the US produced startling results. 
“The research by Rubenking and Lang focuses on things that “are quintessentially gross.” They include a closeup of a woman whose torso is cut open, and a man whose throat is slit, and vomit and feces. The latter had an interesting effect.
The participants didn’t have as much trouble dealing with either of those, unless a human “does something disgusting” with the vomit or feces.
The participants had electrodes attached to various areas of their bodies to measure heart rate and other physiological indicators as they watched a movie on a large screen TV set.
The data from the sensors revealed that the more disgusting the scene, the more involved the participant became. If the scene showed death, the participants could recall it vividly.
There are people out there so ghoulish that they have rerun video clips of the madman in Nice trampling folks to death with his truck. Curiosity is acceptable but this kind of morbid fascination is worrying.
And the worry is morphed into discomfort because it is parceled to you. And you are scrolling mindlessly and it suddenly appears.
Since FB has a limited capacity of stopping anyone and hasn’t even yet given a cop-out to the ‘like’ option we have to singularly fight to get our sanity back. Yes, they do have a full staff working on sanitizing the horrific but it isn’t easy. 
Insider J. Lynn has this to say about blocking the stuff which offends.
“Imagine going to work every day and at the start of your day, with your first cup of coffee, you sit down to glance at beheadings, children in the process of being raped, human bodies in various stages of decomposition, the living and dead results of domestic violence, hanging bodies of 10-year-old boys accused of being gay, real-life snuff films and bloody dog fighting rings and their subsequent results. Can you think up a human horror? 
I’ve probably seen it or a picture or video of something very similar. It’s fair to say that some of the people who work around me do not fare so well. Often they end up suffering from the endless barrage of horror they witness 8 to 12 hours per day. Did I share that most of these people make around a dollar per hour to do this job? That’s the truth.”
I do not want to have 3,255 ‘friends’ because no, it doesn’t make me feel nice and fuzzy. Because the problem is these friends. 
They are the ones who manage to bypass the safety walls because they arbitrarily post the ugly and catapult it into the ether and by the time the FB sentinels track it the damn thing has already gone to thousands.
After you have seen it what difference does it make whether you hide it or delete it, the picture is ingrained in your mind. A few folks have started showing the decency of a black screen with a warning of graphic content. Others should follow. 
And as I begin to whittle down my so called collection of ‘friends’ anyone sending me a picture which offends you go to the top of that list ... and off it.

How to stay safe on public Wi-Fi

Experts say, while using public WiFi networks, It’s a good idea to avoid logging into websites where there’s a chance that cybercriminals could capture your identity, passwords, or personal information — such as social networking sites, online banking services or any websites that store your credit card information.
Many cyber gurus suggest disabling file sharing on your laptop when connected to a public Wi-Fi hotspot. While one can safely keep data in sharing mode when using a private network which is secure, one must disable network sharing option on their smartphones and laptops when on a public Wi-Fi network which will prevent hackers from accessing their data.
In Windows, you can find this under Network and Sharing Center in Control Panel or System Preferences -> Sharing if you’re using a Mac. 
It’s also recommended to turn on the firewall for both OSes. Another good practice would be to use the “Forget network” option for public Wi-Fi networks or delete it once you’re done using it, in order to avoid automatically connecting to it the next time you’re in the area.
It’s also important to keep your software patched to the latest versions, whether you’re on a laptop, smartphone or tablet. 
Hackers are constantly trying to find loopholes and vulnerabilities for your devices, to which manufacturers keep releasing new firmware and updates to fix this. So, the next time you get a notification for an update, don’t ignore it.
Sometimes, even seemingly safe apps have been known inadvertently leak information. A recent investigation by FireEye revealed a popular camera app called Camera360 Ultimate which accidentally leaked sensitive data which could give malicious parties unauthorized access to users’ Camera360 cloud accounts and photos. 
This issue has been fixed in the latest version of the app. Hence, it’s best to limit your usage of third-party apps, especially when on public networks.
Also, when you are traveling, invest in a local SIM so you can use mobile data, instead of being completely reliant on Wi-Fi. Also encrypt your data. Look out for a padlock symbol on your browser. The lock symbol indicates that your connection to the website is encrypted, which is important for your security and privacy. If it’s missing, exit immediately.
The simplest solution of course would be to just stick to your data plan but if you absolutely must use a free Wi-Fi network; then do use a VPN or virtual private network, to get your work done. This way, even if a hacker manages to sniff your data, it will be heavily encrypted.
If you’re using Windows, Opera’s latest developer build offers a free built-in VPN service within the browser which requires no setup. 
Total VPN and CyberGhost and a couple of other popular services that you can try too. Enabling two-factor authentication is another way to protect your login details.
Of course, there are no absolute guarantees when it comes to safeguarding your privacy, even with precautions in place. That’s just one of the side-effects of living in a heavily interconnected world. 
Staying vigilant and restricting the type of activities you conduct when you’re out of the confines of your home network will go a long way in ensuring your safety on the Web.

3 Tips to Improve the Search Ranking for Your Blog Posts

How Ranking for Keywords Has Changed

Optimizing your blog post to rank high in search engines used to be straightforward: pick your keyword and make sure you use it in the title and a few more times in the article. If you picked the right keyword (and if your blog was well-established and referenced), you were most likely to rank somewhere in top 10.

Keyword research has quietly changed over the past few years. First, search engines like Google have become much more sophisticated when it comes to understanding what “high-quality content” is. It’s not only about how well your article is optimized: it’s also how in-depth, useful, and comprehensive it is.

Second, the competition is growing: most bloggers know the basics of search engine optimization these days. It’s harder to stand out and get ranked.

Here’s how you can get ahead of your competitors.

#1: Include More Keywords

The days when you wrote one blog post per keyword are gone. Google (as well as your audience) now looks for more in-depth long-form content that features a varied vocabulary including synonyms, related phrases, and concepts.

Use tools like Soolve to expand your list of keywords.

The following tools will help you expand your keyword lists:

Seed Keywords helps you crowdsource your friends and followers into suggesting related keywords for you. The tool creates shareable mini-surveys for your followers to help you brainstorm more ways to search for your topic.

Soovle will generate keyword suggestions from multiple sources (Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo, Answers.com, and Bing), giving you a good overview of how people search for your keyword on different platforms.

Another tool that does the same (but supports fewer sources) is the Google Keyword Suggest Tool. It generates suggestions from Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon and it digs very deep, so you’ll get hundreds of phrases to work with.

Reference.com and Synonym.com will help you expand your keyword list with synonyms.

Synonyms are a great way to expand keyword lists.

If you’re looking to optimize your existing blog posts, use Serpstat to go through your site, pick the most powerful pages, and suggest a list of “missing keywords.”Essentially, these are words your competitors are ranking high for, but you’re not.

Connection Strength refers to the number of competitors that rank for the keyword that you don’t have on your page.

Now all you need to do is go back to your articles and optimize them for those missing keywords to increase your ranking.

An easy way to optimize existing content for new keywords is to add new sections (with subheadings) targeting those new words. This helps content get more comprehensive over time, which naturally results in more social media shares and backlinks.

#2: Refer to Notable People, Places, and Brands

One of the biggest changes in search engine optimization is Google’s focus on understanding entities. “Entities” are related notable people, places, organizations, brands, etc., which associate in some way with your keyword.

For the easiest way to demonstrate how entities help in ranking your content, read this awesome case study by Bill Slawski. Bill took a well-optimized piece and rewrote it the following way: first by making it much longer, and second by including notable events and people. The result was astounding. The article started to drive referral traffic from people linking to it, and return visits. And yes, better search rankings too!

Google pays special attention to entities when trying to understand how concise and useful your content is. Google has had years to learn to understand entities, concepts, and their relationships.

Google pays close attention to entities and how they relate to your content.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is an entity graph. Search for any notable name you’re aware of to see how Google structures and relates entities.

To research related entities, use your own common sense. Chances are you already know a lot about your content’s topic. Next, search Google. In some cases, Google suggests related concepts while you’re still typing your query.

Google uses entities to verify how concise and useful your content is.

Run content that ranks well through an entity extractor. Pick a few in-depth articles on your topics and run the content through AlchemyAPI (alternative tools: TextRazor andOpen Calais). AlchemyAPI extracts entities from the content using color-coding to mark up sentiment.

Run several long-form articles on your topic through AlchemyAPI and you’ll have a solid list of related entities.

#3: Answer Niche Questions

Another area Google focuses heavily on these days is measuring the ability of content to answer popular niche questions. You might have noticed Google’s “quick answer boxes” each time you type a question into the search box.

Is your content answering popular niche questions?

It’s important to make question research part of your keyword research each time you’re writing a blog post.

The aforementioned Serpstat does question-focused keyword research, too. There’s no visualization, but it returns some unique results, which are free.

This is a whole list of content ideas for you to use!

Answer The Public is a cool tool for content inspiration and question-focused keyword research. Type any word into Answer The Public to see a visualization of various types of questions people ask using that word.

The question modifiers are: which, who, what, when, why, how, are, and where.

Answer The Public is great for content inspiration.

Another trick is to research niche questions using Twitter Advanced Search. While it won’t deliver as many content-worthy results, it will help you research and use natural language (which is something Google is focusing on as well, especially for mobile search).

To find questions on Twitter, search any keyword with a question mark placed one space away, like this: “keyword ?” This filters Twitter search results to those containing a question.

You can search Twitter for updates containing questions.

You can use Cyfe to monitor and archive the Twitter search results.

Cyfe searchable Twitter search archives can provide inspiration when you’re stuck.

Conclusion

Keyword research has evolved, and it’s definitely more complicated. At the same time, though, it’s also more diverse. It encourages you to create in-depth content and works wonders for inspiration.

What do you think? Are there any unique keyword research tools you’d like to share? Please post them in the comments below!

Social media as a marketing tool

US presidential race always draws huge global attention. It is interesting to note the changes in strategies, breaking news, amusing remarks and scathing attacks almost in the real time. Social media has really made all the difference.

It is not that social media was not there during the elections of 2008 and 2012, but the popularity and the way people are using it nowadays signals a new era for political campaigns not only in the US but in the whole world. 
We cannot ignore the fact that the Saudi Vision 2030 made its presence felt initially by opening a Twitter account.
The first sign of change can be glimpsed in the amount of money dedicated to social media in the overall budget of the presidential campaigns. 
In 2008, Obama spent around $22 million (SR82.5 million) on the digital part of his historical “yes, we can” campaign. However, in his 2012 campaign, the digital part ended up growing to staggering $47 million (SR176 million) although his Republican rival by that time, Mitt Romney, dedicated no more than $4.7 million (SR17.6 million) from his budget to online campaigning. The results could not be more obvious; Obama posted a lot more online and got outstanding response.
“In a sample taken from June that year, Obama had accrued almost double Romney’s Facebook ‘likes’ (1,124,275 v 633,597). His victorious Facebook post in the afterglow of his presidential election was a simple image of Obama and his wife with the caption ‘Four more years,’” reported the Social Media Week.
According to many analysts in political marketing, the amount of money spent for campaigning to win the US presidency this year will easily cross the $1 billion (SR3.75 billion) mark. That is a huge leap of faith in the influence of social media platform these days, from $47 million to $1 billion in four years. 
Prof. Marjorie Hershey, from University of Indianapolis, has been quoted by DNA India saying, “73 percent Americans are now on social media and that’s an upward trend that shows no signs of stopping. 
The last US election was prominent for its innovative and effective use of social media campaigning. With all this year’s prospective candidates spending time and money on digital campaigns, though, voters now expect engaging social content as a given.”
Another interesting point to notice is that not only the candidates are interested in social media, but the platforms themselves like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snapchat are trying to take part in the political conversation first hand. Twitter, for instance, shut down two apps that showed tweets politicians had deleted, and hosted a breakfast event in Washington rolling out the proverbial red carpet for candidates as reported by the Social Times.
Facebook’s head of US Industry for Politics and Government, Eric Laurence, once cited the benefits of their video advertising saying that it was a “great way to reach and mobilize supporters and voters that candidates need to win elections.”
Even the newcomer, Snapchat, has rolled out many stories and filters specifically designed for the presidential race.
It is a new field of research in marketing and political campaigning; how to find winning strategies to persuade crowds and engage them in discussions surrounding political races. It is another sign that social media has become a vital part of our daily lives.

Securing privacy on Google made easy

A new tool called My Activity makes it easier to see what information Google is stockpiling about you, and to delete searches you’d rather want it to forget. Here is an easy way to manage your privacy:

My Activity: You can find it by going to https://myactivity.google.com. (Note: You’ll probably be prompted to re-enter your password as a security measure.) 

Once you’ve made it in, there should be a big chronological list of things you’ve done using Google’s services — the searches you’ve made, videos you’ve watched on YouTube, and so on.

You can even search through the data trove to look up a specific record or activity Google has saved.

Find the info you want to delete: After spotting information you want to delete, which is made easy with the search bar at the top of the page. Once you’ve found the bit in the timeline, you can open a little menu by clicking on the three vertical dots on the right end of the record. Select the delete option on that menu, and Google will delete it.

You can also delete things in bulk by clicking on the three dot menu at the top of the timeline, choose “Delete activity by” and selecting a date range to erase on the next page. If you want an entirely blank slate, opt for the “All Time” option.

Stop Google tracking private info: You can “pause” Google’s data collection whenever you want. To lock things down, head to https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols. From there, you can tell Google to stop saving information about things such as your searches, location history, and YouTube-watching list.

“Privacy Checkup,” which can be found at https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup/, uses a simple interface to not only help you manage what data is being saved by Google, but also things like what information about you may be public through services like Google+.

Also, the search giant makes the vast majority of its money from distributing targeting ads, which is made easier by the trove of data that they have about users’ online activities. 

But that means that limiting the data they save will probably result in you seeing ads that are less relevant to your interests. 

And beyond ads, Google uses the information to help personalize their products to users’ preferences, which can mean a more convenient online experience. 

For instance, Google has said that letting it save your search history can mean that it returns results quicker and letting it hold on to location history can help it suggest better commute options in its Maps product.

Android skilling program launched in India

Google on Monday launched its “Android Skilling and Certification” program to help make the country a global hub of high-quality mobile developers.
According to the Indo-Asian News Service, the program aims to train two million mobile developers by offering a slew of initiatives to train and certify talented students and developers in Android development.
“With nearly four million developers, India is expected to have [the] largest developer population globally by 2018. But today, only 25 percent of them are building for mobile,” Caesar Sengupta, Vice President (Product Management) at Google, told reporters in New Delhi.
India is uniquely placed to innovate and shape the Internet experience of billions of users “who are and will come online on the mobile platform,” he added.
Google also launched an instructor-led training program on Android fundamentals to provide an in-person training to students in universities.
In addition to all public and private universities and training institutes of the National Skill Development Corporation of India, the course will be available free of charge on NTPEL (an initiative of IITs and IISc) as part of its online “Mobile Computing” course, starting from July 18.
Google has tied up with training partners like Edureka, Koenig, Manipal Global, Simplilearn, Udacity and UpGrad who will operate as authorized Android training partners in India to help Google train the trainers and update Android courseware to prepare students for Android certification.
“By building a world-class curriculum and making it easily accessible to the students, we want to contribute to the Skill India initiative and make India the global leader in mobile app development,” Sengupta added.
Google also announced the launch of its globally recognized job-oriented “Associate Android Developer Certification” exam that will help candidates get an entry-level Android developer job. After training, the aspiring candidates can log on to the Google Developer training website and take the certification exam priced at Rs. 6,500.
“We introduced the Android Nanodegree program in India last year with Udacity and today, we have over 11,500 students in India enrolling every month in our courses,” said Peter Lubbers, Head of Google Developer Training. Google will also open-source all Android Developer Fundamentals practicals and courseware and make these available to everyone for free.

Twitter CEO Dorsey’s account hacked

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The Twitter chief executive, Jack Dorsey, had his Twitter and Vine accounts hacked, the Guardian reported.
The hacking group which posted on Dorsey’s account, OurMine Security, is the same group which has previously defaced social media accounts belonging to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google boss Sundar Pichai. 
This time, OurMine released a few Vine videos through Dorsey’s account, which cross-posted to his Twitter feed.
The publicity-hungry hackers posted their standard message – that they were “testing your security” – along with the last video they posted.
As with every previous hack carried out by OurMine, Twitter itself was not the source of the compromise. This time, the hackers appeared to have gained access to Vine, and used their access there to post to the main feed. Previous weak links used by the group have included Bitly and Quora.
Of course, this time is slightly more embarrassing, given that Twitter also owns Vine. Many Vine users log in through Twitter, which allows them to protect their accounts using the app’s two-factor authentication, but older Vine users may also have a separate username and password. This could be how Dorsey’s account was compromised.
Twitter said: “We don’t comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons.” The company pointed the Guardian to a post from June this year on how to secure your account, but didn’t say whether the problem was Dorsey failing to follow his own company’s advice, or the advice not being enough to actually secure your account. What OurMine’s hacks lack in technical skill, they make up for in persistence, and they underscore that in technology’s connected ecosystem, any weak link can be enough to lead to an embarrassing breach.