RSS has never been fashionable — it is always been a news gathering tool for nerds, not norms. But now, more than two years after the untimely demise of Google Reader, RSS almost feels cool — like listening to vinyl or hating things on Twitter. RSS is a stealthy way to obtain news thats fast, friendly, and free from both ads and trackers. Its ubiquity makes me wonder why anyone bothers with browsers and adblockers at all, especially when mobile.

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Question for you to answer: What is YOUR goal for your business startup?

I cannot stress enough the importance of knowing the answer to that question. A defined goal helps your team plan strategic & measurable steps; while, in the process, you also keep resources in check as you strive to reach it.

It can be used as a tool to achieve either of these goals:

increased email subscribers
grow profitability
get leads
more website traffic to your website
improved customers service
increased brand awareness
…and more!

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A man suspected of a double murder was on the run, and a lot of people turned to the Knox County prosecutors Facebook page to find out about it.

Posts about the killings of Sandra Lee Stelk and Jaime Barber — who were found shot to death in a rural Knox County home on Sept. 30 — and about suspect Travis Bonham were each shared hundreds of times and reached more than 100,000 people.

This was good news to Prosecutor Chip McConville and his legal assistant and communications manager, Emily Morrison, who have worked since January to find ways to use social media that are helpful to the public.

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A recent analysis conducted by a University of Florida educational leadership scholar indicates the lack of concrete policy on the use of social media by teachers and other school employees is increasing the potential for misuse and inappropriate teacher-student relationships online.

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Facebook has released a new application called Notify that will allow its users to receive push notifications about breaking news, new movie trailers, and more.

The move into real-time news is significant because could help Facebook achieve two goals: It could make the company more important to the media, and it could increase the traffic it sends to publishers. Now, whether the app will be successful or just something that clogs up your phones notifications feed is another set of questions all together.

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Are you tired of Facebooks trending section in your News Feed? Celebrity news getting annoying? Would you rather have legitimate news? Introducing Fluffblocker.

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The ethics guidance interpreting Attorney Advertising rules in the social media context continues to evolve, but this time the evolution appears to be for the better, taking into account the realities of the growing use of social media. As you may recall, early last year, the New York County Lawyers Association weighed in on the ethical implications for lawyers using LinkedIn and suggested that attorneys using the self-proclaimed Worlds Largest Professional Network needed to beware that their posts on that site, even the most casual, did not run afoul of the attorney advertising rules.

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Feeds are added one after the other to Munch which is the program's greatest shortcoming, especially if you have an opml file full of feeds already that you would like to import.

This means that you need to add feed after feed manually in the application which is a problem considering that you need to get hold of feed urls first somehow to do so.

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Twitters Moments feature lets users step back from their rapid-fire feeds and see what hot topics are dominating internet chatter. From news to funnies to trending subjects, Moments blend media and commentary into curated, bitesize overviews.

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The U.S. Digital Registry was announced Jan. 29 as a one-stop shop for the social networking needs of government departments who are actively engaged on such platforms as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Unlike official government websites that end with .gov or .mil, profiles created through third-party platforms can often look deceptively authentic, but are used to mislead the public and steal personal information.

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I previously analyzed their 2013 report and their 2014 report and came to the same conclusion each year. Most companies still do not get social media as a customer service channel.

Six years ago, I did my own tiny social media study. That is back when the Starbucks Twitter profile said that some guy named Brad did the tweeting. Things are pretty much the same as even back then. (Except for Brad. I am not sure what happened to him.)

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Social media is a double-edged sword, providing both benefits and drawbacks.

In order to stay connected, many of us are becoming captivated by these pervasive tools. A social media report by Sensis in 2015 reported that nearly half of all Australians access one or more social networking sites every day.

The report also found that Australians now spend an average of 8.5 hours a week on Facebook alone, with 24% checking social media more than five times a day. Seven in ten people used a smartphone to access their accounts.

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Since starting the Johnny Bullet comic strip, I’ve begun reading many more web comics than before to the extent that I read more of them than print or digital comics. It has been an interesting transition from one of those comic book store devotee to getting most of my comics from individual creators online. One technology has helped make this transition possible. It is the RSS feed.

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~ Over 70% of teens have smart phones which means they have access to the internet which in turn means they have easy access to pornography.
~ Most teens are on their phones all the time - in school, in bed at night, when they go to the bathroom, while you are trying to talk to them, and while they are trying to do their homework.
~ They are in instant access with each other all the time - living in a perpetual state of staccato interruptions.

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The most fervent political supporters think only their candidate can possibly win. Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle blames these beliefs on the echo chambers found on our social media feeds.

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Are you tired of Facebooks trending section in your News Feed? Celebrity news getting annoying? Would you rather have legitimate news? Introducing Fluffblocker.

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I remember a time before Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, emojis, instant messaging and memes. I remember when my friends used to ride their bikes passed my home to see if I was there -- now, we always know where everyone is. Sometimes because it is self-reported (on a social media platform) but also because we can send them a quick text.

So the term digital native is a little too loose for me, the date range is too baggy around the sides.

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Health is definitely one of those things we do not notice till it starts to ebb away. Isn’t it also true that medical news is the last thing you like to read or see in newspapers and television? That is, if you do not have any illness in the family. I pray you do not, but if you do then the web has always been a secondary source of some great information. The first source should always be your general practitioner and physician.

There is no harm in arming yourself with information when you need to talk to a doctor. A better informed patient (or a patients guardian) makes for a wiser decision maker. We are living on the cutting edge of great medical leaps. Medical news and alerts help us to keep pace with these leaps. Let’s look at some top websites for RSS medical news feeds and stay alert with the help of their feeds.

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In what has become a heartbreaking routine—employed during the Paris attacks of 2015, as well as after recent terrorist attacks in such places as Belgium and Istanbul — people shared emotional memes in solidarity with the city of Nice, where 84 people were killed by a truck driver barrelling into the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais.

Using the hashtags #PrayForNice or #JeSuisNice, people expressed solidarity over the deaths of at least 84 people, which French President Francois Hollande says was caused by an act of terrorism.

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Do you want to exclude specific categories from RSS feed on your WordPress site? Many site owners use some categories for content that they don’t want to appear in the RSS feed of their site. In this article, we will show you how to exclude specific categories from WordPress RSS feed.

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It is absolutely crucial for brands to keep a crisis management plan handy. Ideally, this plan gives an idea of who internally should lead the response and what stance they should take. An effective crisis management plan (or lack thereof) can have a substantial impact on your business.

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Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter have all been the target of passionate groups of users claiming that the sites have embraced censorship.

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Facebooks News Feed for mobile will become much friendlier to vertical videos in the near future, according to Marketing Land. It will not exactly be optimized for the orientation the way Snapchat is, but it will apparently stop cropping and showing them as tiny squares. The publication says when the update rolls out for Android and iOS, you'll start seeing vertical videos with a 2:3 aspect ratio (as opposed to 1:1) on your News Feed without having to expand them.

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Is social media addiction a real thing? Experts say yes, and they are seeing more and more people suffering from it.

The number of likes on Instagram. The comments you get on your Facebook post. If it seems, you can't get away from social media. You could have a problem.

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This summer, the American Civil Liberties Union of California requested records from 63 police departments, sheriffs and district attorneys across California. Of the records they received, 40 percent of the agencies (20) used social media surveillance tools, and most of them started using them within the last year.

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Social media monitoring services such as Geofeedia rely on bulk data access to be able to search far larger volumes of social media posts, and more efficiently, than the average user.

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A Chicago company has marketed a tool using text, photos and videos gleaned from major social media companies to aid law enforcement surveillance of protesters, civil liberties activists say.

The company, called Geofeedia, used data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as nine other social media networks, to let users search for social media content in a specific location, as opposed to searching by words or hashtags that would be less likely to reveal an exact location.

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The Internet is a big place. Really big. With more than a billion existing pages and thousands more being created each day, there is a wealth of great sites offering fantastic content free of charge. But with such a massive torrent of media being produced each and every day, it can often be tough to keep up with all your favorite websites. So, how do we alleviate this problem? Easy. Here’s a really simple explanation of Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

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Specifically, all three companies granted access to a developer tool called Geofeedia which allows users to see the geographic origin of social media posts and has been employed by more than 500 law enforcement organizations to track protesters in real time.

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Predicting the future is hardly a precise science, but identifying macro trends and developments can be done by paying close attention to what is happening in an industry. Here is what a handful of small businesses, startups and analysts are seeing in their crystal balls.

1. We will hear more about how autonomous cars connect to the network.
2. Funding will skew toward artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). And most of it will be a bust.
3. Mobile will continue to rise as the primary shopping platform.

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As we wind down the year and look back on 2016, we find that social media is on everyones lips–but perhaps for different reasons than we social media marketers would imagine or prefer. The discussion happening around social media at the end of the year is about responsibility and control.

The outcomes of the EU Referendum in Great Britain and the American presidential election were no doubt influenced to a greater or lesser degree by social media, from President-elect Donald Trump’s insistence on using Twitter as an unfiltered direct communication channel with his followers and critics, to the soul-searching happening in some quarters about the role social media played in serving up news stories to the American electorate.

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Last week, the APA released a study finding that Americans were experiencing the first statistically significant stress increase in the surveys 10-year history. In January, 57 percent of respondents of all political stripes said the U.S. political climate was a very or somewhat significant source of stress, up from 52 percent who said the same thing in August.

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Syndication represents a very useful way to expand your reach, build your audience, and contribute to your industrys thought leadership. The quality of your message influences the quality of your customer development and engagement results, but this is often not enough.

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If you have ever tried your hand at blogging then you are already aware it can be more challenging than others may assume. Between all of the brainstorming, research, writing, and editing, you are devoting a lot of time to just one piece of content. While that content is extremely useful, there just may be times when you can’t find the time to create amazing blog posts on a daily basis. This is where content syndication comes into play.

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Struggling to edit an RSS Feed? Our advice use FeedForAll for creating and editing existing RSS feeds.

If you have ever bought an item that a celebrity recommended on Twitter or been persuaded by a discussion with a Facebook friend, you know that social media can impact your behavior and opinions. But you might be surprised to know that there is a science behind social media interactions.

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I need to create a new RSS feed from an existing feed, with just a simple change: I want to add the authors name into each title so that a post from (say) me with the title Looking for tech advice would be changed to have the title

Tech Advice

Social networks are here to stay, and they are constantly evolving. Globally, more than 2.8 billion people — or 37% of the world's population — use social media, but the way those users interact with each other, and the platforms they adopt, vary widely.

Social Media Demographics

The popular social media platforms are obvious to most people – Facebook has a UK audience of some 40 million, LinkedIn and Twitter both exceed 20 million, and Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat have close to 10 million each. The reach of these platforms makes it clear that social media is now ubiquitous. But for all the big name players, what is the definition of social media? Where did it come from? And how did it gain such an important role in our lives so quickly?

What is social media and how did it grow so quickly?

Content marketing paved its way into the global village a decade back and has immediately shone up to fame with the coming of new media. Business houses across the globe are increasingly developing solutions for content marketing.

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It takes time to build an audience: you need to attract them to your site, which they’ve likely never heard of, and convert them into loyal readers, so they come back and tell their friends – and eventually turn into customers, which is the whole goal of content marketing.

The Truth About Content Syndication and Duplicate Content

For a growing number of people, their activities online have become their real jobs. Achieving influencer status on Instagram or YouTube can help a onetime enthusiast who filmed videos from his childhood bedroom earn a legitimate six-figure salary. Today, social-media stardom is no longer a springboard to a mainstream career but a career in and of itself. For these tech-savvy self-promoters, there’s a lucrative world of freebies, sponsorships and other moneymaking opportunities at their fingertips.

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Twitter has been in hot water as more evidence emerges showing how Russia used the social network to influence public opinion. Ahead of a November 1st Congressional hearing on Russian manipulation, Twitter has introduced sweeping new rules for how it shares data on political posts. The network will launch a Transparency Center that lists all ads appearing on Twitter, including promoted ones that previously only appeared to targeted demographics, and will clearly label them when they appear in user feeds.


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Over 90% of medium and large businesses have used social media in their marketing for five years or longer. Yet the CMO Survey reveals that nearly half of marketers are unable to show the impact of their social media investments. That’s why, no matter what your social media strategy is, it is always a good idea to go back and make sure you have the basics covered. Your company may discover that it needs a strategic do-over.

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In this hi-tech, pre-armageddon, screen-filled modern world, social media is all pervasive.

It has sucked us in. It is the new God. We are now its slave.

That might be over-egging things slightly, but for some people, social media has become a true addiction.

So, how do you know if your social media habit has descended from a harmless pastime into a full-blown addiction?

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According to a new study, people with certain personality traits are more likely to develop a social media addiction.

The study found that three personality traits in particular — neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness — were related to social media addiction. Two other personality traits, extraversion and openness to experience, were not linked with social media addiction.

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And yet, unlike other social networks that followed it, HASTAC has managed to remain scandal-free. There have been no mass boycott movements and no accusations that the network ever misused anyone’s data.

Cathy Davidson, co-founder and co-director of HASTAC, and a professor of cultural history and technology at the City University of New Yorks Graduate Center, said that the secret to the networks good relationship with its users has been its decision to treat user data with respect from the outset. Privacy and security have been priorities for the network since its inception, and are built into every facet of the network.

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What predicted Facebook’s FB, +1.63%   scandal involving data firm Cambridge Analytica and the private information of 50 million user profiles without their consent?

How about the 2010 film The Social Network?

The movie, directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, was a fictionalized account of how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg messily developed the social-networking site while at Harvard.

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Half a million doctors worldwide are sharing their knowledge on a social network for medics to find answers for their patients.

On MedShr, set up in 2014 by a London cardiologist, doctors can post details of cases and other medics can give their input.

A doctor treating a young Afghan refugee in Serbia, who needed plates and pins in his legs, received advice from other specialists that helped formulate a plan to help the boy walk again. In Kenya, hospitals run by junior doctors are able to get remote support from seniors.

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The societal and psychological consequences of social media in the information age are emerging slowly. The consequences of the headline-grabbing examples above are fairly obvious, but other implications might not be as immediately apparent.

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