Flickr photo by Steve Rhodes

The Pentagon is gearing up for a looming social media war–battles the military envisions will be won by being one step ahead of Twitter- and Facebook-powered insurgencies.

For the Pentagon that means developing social media tools that combine the code-breaking know-how of its intelligence services with the propaganda skills and manipulation techniques of its Pys-Ops group. On top of all that, the Pentagon hopes it can revolutionize the analysis of social media trends and conversations.

It’s all part of the Defense Department’s new Social Media in Strategic Communication program, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) first announced a few weeks ago.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s secretive research agency, is offering a $42 million contract to the company that can go where no social media tracker has gone before. DARPA posted a request for proposals in July that basically says don’t bother applying if your idea is nothing more than the next step in social media analytics. In other words, it means creating social media analytics light-years ahead of anything on the market or even on the drawing board. Following the trending topics on Twitter ain’t going to cut it. Read more

Flickr photo by Stuck in Customs

If you follow the major online influencers (yeah, I’m talking about you, Scoble, Brogan, Kawasaki, Rowse et al) you’ve noticed that all of them are gaga over Google+. For sure, G+ is a fascinating platform with tremendous potential. Google took some of the best features of Facebook and Twitter and rolled them into an easy to use (if difficult to fully understand) social media network.

But despite its upside, G+ is far from perfect. And while those smart guys in Menlo Park will surely be adding features and improving things in the coming days, weeks and months, here are the Top 10 reasons Google+ will fail:

10. Here come the spammers

9. Two words: Google Wave

8. Privacy? What privacy?

7. No search. No hashtags.

6. You’re in my “Friends” circle. I’m in your “Asshats” circle.

5. Keeping your circles organized is a lot like trying to keep your sock drawer organized, but only if you have 1,000 pairs of socks in 100 different drawers.

4. Search, e-mail, chat, maps, YouTube: Do you really want Google to have this much control over your life?

3. Cat gifs

2. It’s Google’s way or the highway.

1. I’ve got to use Picassa. Really?

Back in April, when I was asked to talk about social media and government transparency at this week’s Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, one of the first things I did was make a list of Members of Congress who “get” social media.

It was a very short list. For one, most Members of Congress leave the tweeting to their staff. The other thing is that their Twitter feeds are often one-way conversations. They’re social only in the sense that they want you to hear what they have to say–but who knows if they’re listening to you. When Twitter is used effectively, it’s as a tool to not only inform and entertain but to engage.

Anthony Weiner was one of the exceptions. Before his awful implosion, his Twitter feed was humorous, insightful, engaging. It represented an unprecedented milestone–our democracy entering an age where the American public for the first time could have instant, unfiltered access to a Member of Congress. Unfortunately, it also answered the question of whether there’s such a thing as too much transparency.

What will be the fallout of Weinergate? Will it be a setback for government transparency via social media? Read more

Photo by Joe Newman

I took this photo during a January snow storm in D.C. It’s dark and moody and the snow is whipping around in what looks like 10 different directions. If I was a better photographer, I might be able to tell you how I thoughtfully set my exposure and aperture before waiting for just the exact moment to fire off several frames. Except, I only snapped one picture and it was with an iPhone. Before I left that corner, I had processed the photo with one of the 13 filters on the Instagram app and uploaded it simultaneously to my Facebook, Flickr and Twitter accounts (and it would have gone to Foursquare, too, if I hadn’t entered the wrong password). Read more

For the past several months, JC Penney was inexplicably at the top of the Google search results for everything from dresses to area rugs. Let that percolate for a bit. JC Penney? Really?

Well, it turns out that JC Penney either knowingly or unknowingly through a third party, gamed the Google search engine to the tune of tens of millions of extra hits a month for the past three to four months. There’s no telling how many of those hits translated into online sales. But you’ve got to figure the retailer got a major boost during the holiday shopping season from its undeserved search engine rankings. The New York Times’ David Segal dishes the dirt on JC Penney’s foray into black hat SEO in “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.”

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

JC Penney is apparently paying the price. Google’s punitive action includes pushing the brand deep down into the nether regions of its search results.

The link farming tactics revealed by the NYT have been going on for years. What’s perhaps more disturbing is that it took the NYT to blow the whistle on JC Penney. Where were Google’s safeguards? We’re talking large-scale manipulation of search rankings.

Did Google turn a blind eye? Or is its internal security system so lax that it could let such a massive black hat operation go on for months?