Thousands of years ago, clans gathered around fires to share their days experiences and to tell stories that established group norms and shaped social organization. Today, the fires embers have been replaced by the glow of internet-connected devices, but the communal exchange of stories and perspectives remains a fundamental force in social development.

From a business standpoint, a few important differences emerge from this evolution. Social media users can now publicly discuss their experiences with brands or products, forming large coalitions of interest that exert vast social pressure on brands and other organizations. From the presidential election to the newest cereal, everything is now a matter of public interest.

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This month marks the fifth anniversary of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which was first coined following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. In the course of those five years, #BlackLivesMatter has become an archetypal example of modern protests and political engagement on social media: A new Pew Research Center analysis of public tweets finds the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times on Twitter – an average of 17,002 times per day – as of May 1, 2018.

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The U.S. is quickly becoming a podcast nation. According to a 2017 survey, nearly 25 percent of Americans — around 68 million — said they listened to podcasts. Forty-two percent were even willing to pay to do so. The largest contingent of podcast listeners (44 percent) are millennials, and that coveted cohort's tuned-in attention has attracted advertisers, whose podcast-generated revenue rose from $69 million in 2015 to $220 million in 2017. In the last four years alone, the popularity of podcast listening has doubled.

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Gray Hat SEO is an SEO practice that's riskier than White Hat SEO, but one that may or may not result in your site being banned from search engines and their affiliate sites. Generally, Gray Hat SEO practices belong in neither the Black Hat nor White Hat category because the terms of service regarding the issue are unclear. In this tutorial, you will get the answers to the following questions:

What is Gray Hat SEO?
Why does it matter?
What Gray Hat SEO should mean to you

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You have none of the usual constraints of traditional forms of media in terms of length, deadlines, format or language.

Plus -- and this is no small plus -- podcast listeners are some of the most loyal consumers of any form of media available today. If they listen once, they're likely to come back, again and again.

There are multiple reasons for that, and multiple ways to do it well, which we'll explore below.

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Marketing scams have been around for years. The best ones are those that become accepted as the norm — bottled water anyone? The last 20 years, however, has given rise to a new type of online scam and no acronym in the online business world conjures up images of snake oil salesmen quite like SEO.

You’re not alone in being contacted by services claiming they will get your business website to the top of Google within a month. We get them almost daily. It’s frustrating, especially for those of us that are passionate about providing a high-quality SEO service.

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RSS was first invented by Netscape. They wanted to use an XML format to distribute news, stories and information. Netscape refined the version of rss and then dropped it. Userland Software to control of the specficiation and continued to develop it releasing a newer version. A non-commercial group picked up RSS at the same time and based on their interpretation of the Netscapes original concept of RSS they too released a new version. UserLand was not happy with the non-commercial version and continued development of their own version of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), eventually UserLand released RSS v2.

The History of RSS

A lot of business owners think SEO--search engine optimization, or the art of promoting your content on search engines without paying for it--and keywords are something you can sprinkle onto a website like magical fairy dust after it is built. Unfortunately, that is just not the case. To rank on Google, search engine optimization needs to be more than an afterthought—SEO needs to be built right into your website’s structure.

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It is easy to get news on the Internet these days. In fact, it’s too easy to get news from the Internet to the point that it is also to easy to get the wrong news. Some have considered RSS feeds obsolete and boring but when it comes to getting news straight from the horse’s mouth, nothing still beats this direct and largely open method. Last time we looked at Wallabag for saving your articles. This time we are going to take a look at some open source RSS feed readers that give you those articles in the first place.

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After suspending Cambridge Analytica from its platform in March, Facebooks data management issues remained the lead social media news story throughout 2018. The companys constant stream of user privacy challenges left little space for other social platforms to make waves — but, some still managed. Twitter put its focus on election integrity and performed a massive purge of bad user accounts. While Facebook and Twitter focused on cleaning up timelines, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn continued to build out their ad offerings.

Nearly all platforms released new political advertising policies, and you could not open an app without bumping into a Story. (In fact, now that Snapchats original concept has made its way to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, the real question is why does not Pinterest have them?) In its spare time, Facebook did its best to recruit more video creators, YouTube gave its creator base more monetization opportunities, and Instagram launched a video platform. Not to be left out of the mix, Reddit wrapped up its first major redesign in over a decade.

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Social media sites and apps are constantly changing and evolving to match the needs of their user base — for good, and for ill. Whether its Facebook Watchs new shows actually making it worth using, or Snapchats reviled redesign, social media changes can be a polarizing topic for the millions of people who use the sites every day.

But sometimes, the changes just raise the whole site or app a bit, and make the experience of using them better (or mercifully less tedious). These are the best social media changes we saw this year.

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There are very few industries these days that change as quickly as social media. Every new discovery or algorithm update has the potential to shape the future of how we connect with each other and our clients. This past year has been an exceptionally tumultuous one for social media networks, even for an ever-changing industry. We have seen a huge paradigm shift in social media in 2018 toward consumer awareness and expectation. It’s bound to have a major effect on how brands will connect with their customers through social media in the future.

As we wrap up the year, lets take a look back at what has changed in social media in 2018 and how it will impact social media marketing strategy building in 2019.

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Brands were more creative than ever in their social media posts this year and connected with audiences by raising awareness of social issues, according to social media analytics company Unmetric.

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Ever since it started existing, governments have had a love-hate relationship with social media. Predictably, the romance starts to sour when social media contains criticism of the government as it often does and the affair blooms when the opposite happens, in particular when sycophancy takes on gargantuan proportions. In our particular case, only days before the elections, we have a peculiar situation where social media is being manipulated with the seeming intention of bringing about a certain outcome in the polls.

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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is looking to get its hands on a product that will help its agents investigate tax dodgers who have set up shop on social media, according to a request posted to the federal government’s procurement website, FedBizOpps.

The post indicates that the IRS, whose under-equipped enforcement agents ferret out financial crime related to the tax system, is looking for a new way to investigate potential tax cheats based on their social media usage, citing as one example the ubiquity of online stores. The IRS currently has no formal tool, it says, to comb through social media feeds.

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Every company marketer posting on social media is curious about the best times to post their content. While each audience is unique, having a rule of thumb can be extremely helpful when you are first starting out. Sprout Social recently published the results of their Best Times to Post on Social Media: 2018 Industry Research, a report which includes preferred time slots for the big 4 — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Most modern businesses understand the importance of using social media to promote their brand and interact with consumers. Indeed, social media is at the core of many companies’ digital strategy, often delivering measurable results in terms of sales, leads and customer service. That said, there are many social media mistakes that we see time and time again: strategic errors that leave leads on the table and opportunities unexplored.

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Entrepreneurs who are cheating taxes with online stores, beware: The IRS is looking for new ways to catch suspected tax cheats over social media.

Specifically, the IRS wants a new tool to help it check public social media feeds and websites for details on people already suspected of not complying with the tax code, the tax-collecting agency said in a Dec. 18 request for information from vendors.

Social media could provide investigators with a treasure trove of data, showing where taxpayers live, what they drive and what they are selling online. That data could be useful to the IRS as it tries to catch people cheating on their taxes — if the agency can figure out how to collect and use it without running afoul of its own internal rules.

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AI plays a huge role in how Spotify delivers personalized playlists to users, so it's somewhat fitting that the companys new partnership with Microsoft is focused on messages about how AI can impact all aspects of life -- including education, healthcare and philanthropy. Those messages are going to be showing up in the Discover Weekly playlist for free users, the first time that Spotify has lets brands have full customization and control over advertising in that feed.

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About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.

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Global social media and technology giants are gearing up to fight sweeping new rules proposed by the Indian government that would require them to actively regulate content in one of the world’s biggest Internet markets, sources close to the matter told Reuters.

The rules, proposed by the Information Technology ministry on Christmas Eve, would compel platforms such as Facebook, its messaging service WhatsApp and Twitter to remove unlawful content, such as anything that affected the sovereignty and integrity of India. This had to be done within 24 hours, the rules propose.

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We have all thought about it. Maybe it's time to flick Facebook. Terminate Twitter. Silence social for good, and just be a person again.

Sadly, if this dream of going off the grid is about reclaiming your lost privacy, that might not actually be possible, according to new research.

A new study by researchers at the University of Vermont shows that social media posts by people you're connected with can actually be used to predict your own future posts – and even more accurately than if your own previous posts were being mined for insights.

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The tools we all use for knowledge, communication and business are being re-engineered to stop disinformation. Is our loss of control worth it?

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Schools can not do it all. We have known this for a long time, yet we often seem to deny this reality in policy and action. For decades we have piled expectations onto our schools, asking them to develop scholars, citizens, and workers and to provide for the academic, nutritional, social, and developmental needs of children. Schools, as critics are quick to point out, invariably fall short of these expectations.

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Google is set to begin deleting data from its beleaguered social network, Google+ in April, but before that happens, the Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam say that they are working to preserve public posts on the platform before they vanish forever.

In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won’t be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted.

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Are you looking for ways to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts? Want to know if your social media campaigns are worth your time and effort?

The team from Social Success Marketing share the metrics you can, and should, track in this infographic.

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Google has officially started the process of shutting down and deleting all consumer accounts on its Google+ social network platform, bringing an end to the company’s attempt to directly compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

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Businesses have spent years diligently amassing followings and figuring out the best way to connect with users.

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About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.

The story of how this happened is really two stories. The first is a story about a broad vision for the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.

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The podcast wars are coming.

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On Monday, Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, tested my ability to tell the difference between broccoli and marijuana.

He showed me two pictures of green blobs and asked if they depicted the cruciferous vegetable or the mind-altering plant. I guessed both were cannabis; I was wrong. One, apparently, was an image of tempura broccoli.

Unlike me, Facebooks content-filtering artificial intelligence technology can now determine which image is of food, and which is of marijuana, according to Schroepfer.

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The Academy has done it again -- opted for the safe choices, leaving the truly deserving out in the cold.

Stauffer, Devin, 1970- author

Australia. Parliament. Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, author, issuing body

Bello, Walden F., author

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. Delegation to the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly General Assembly

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Environment and Communications References Committee, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Procedure Committee, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Education and Employment Legislation Committee, author, issuing body

Australia

Australia

Australian National Audit Office, author

Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives. Standing Committee of Privileges and Members' Interests, author

Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives. Standing Committee on Appropriations and Administration, author, issuing body

Western Australia. Parliament. Legislative Council. Standing Committee on Environment and Public Affairs, author, issuing body

Kefford, Glenn, author

Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives. Standing Committee on Petitions, author, issuing body