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.

complete article

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.

complete article

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.

complete article

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

complete article

Amazon is now letting anyone create and publish Alexa skills into the Alexa skills store. Amazon first made it easy to create custom skills last year with its Alexa Skill Blueprints program, and it’s taking those custom responses and allowing them to be published in the store for everyone to download and use. There are currently more than 80,000 existing Alexa skills in the store, but todays announcement means the store will be growing significantly with user-generated custom skills.

Amazon is primarily aiming this new functionality at content creators, businesses, brands, and other organizations. Publications, local sports teams, YouTubers, and others will all be able to broadcast their latest updates by simply adding a recorded audio feed URL to a blueprint skill directly and then publishing it on the store.

complete article

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.

complete article

As social medias influence over politics and elections has risen, so too has our collective anxiety about it. Over the last three years in particular, the use of megaplatforms like Facebook and Twitter as vectors for misinformation has been the subject of congressional hearings and not a few columns on the websites of some of our finer magazines. And as we gear up for elections in 2019 — and, assuming we make it through this year, in 2020 — the anxiety is gearing up, too. On Monday, in anticipation of the European Parliamentary elections in May, the Mozilla Foundation, an influential internet-advocacy non-profit, released an open letter to Facebook, co-signed by 32 civil rights and transparency groups, demanding that the social network implement measures designed to increase transparency, facilitate research, and combat misinformation.

complete article

In many ways, content on the internet is beautifully linked together and accessible, but despite the interconnectivity of it all we still frequently find ourselves visiting this site, then that site, then another site, all in an effort to check for updates and get the content we want. Thats not particular efficient and theres a much better way to go about it.

complete article

Get updates about volcanoes & earthquakes as RSS feeds

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.

complete article

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.

complete article

There is a good reason people call Twitter the hell website.

Cynicism, egos, unprovoked hostility, unchecked propaganda, sexism, bigotry, and outright hate—Twitter is as full of it as virtually anywhere online, and worse, it is unbearably nonstop. The design of the place feels uniquely unhealthy due in large part to its speed and unrelenting stream. Opening up TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client favored by maniacs like me thanks to its real-time updating feature, can seem like stepping into an oncoming tidal wave and getting swept out to sea. Before too long, you feel exhausted and ready to give up.

RSS Is Better than Twitter

Turn on the news, scroll through Twitter or chat with a friend these days, and you are likely to hear about yet another brand or individual suffering yet another social media-induced crisis of some kind.

It seems that every day, every hour, theres some other social media disaster. Does this mean that brands are suddenly behaving more poorly, or is this the state of how we live now?

complete article

There is no questioning the influence of social media in modern society, and our broader interactive process. But still, many businesses remain unsure whether it's right for them, whether they actually need to have a social media presence.

To be fair, it may not be for everyone - if, for example, you sell products aimed specifically at an older sector of the market, it could be that you would be wasting your time posting to a Facebook Page that no one's likely to read.

complete article

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.

complete article

There is a good reason people call Twitter the hell website.

Cynicism, egos, unprovoked hostility, unchecked propaganda, sexism, bigotry, and outright hate—Twitter is as full of it as virtually anywhere online, and worse, its unbearably nonstop. The design of the place feels uniquely unhealthy due in large part to its speed and unrelenting stream. Opening up TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client favored by maniacs like me thanks to its real-time updating feature, can seem like stepping into an oncoming tidal wave and getting swept out to sea. Before too long, you feel exhausted and ready to give up.

complete article

Social media offers the chance to carefully curate a public image and, while some choose to broadcast their professional success or vacations, others are keen to make a show of their moral worth.

complete article

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

complete article

As it prepares to go public under the ticker PINS after filing its S-1 to the Securities Exchange Commission today (March 22), Pinterest said it would rather not be seen as a place like Facebook or Twitter.

The cold shoulder makes sense: Sites that algorithmically serve up content—Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram, and Twitter—remain under fire for their inability to moderate the environments on their own platforms.

complete article

Fiery Feeds Adds iCloud Accounts, Three-Pane iPad View, New Customization Tools, and More..

Fiery Feeds, the modern, flexible RSS client for iOS, was updated today with a variety of new features that take the app to new heights: enabling iCloud-based accounts for RSS and Read Later so you don’t need third-party services, adding a three-pane layout on iPad, offering new, configurable methods for navigation, and a lot more. There is something for everyone, from users who may be new to RSS to Fiery Feeds veterans who will appreciate the additional power offered here.

complete article

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.

complete article

The podcast wars are coming.

complete article

Wish you could follow a couple of Twitter or Instagram users, without setting up an account? Create an RSS feed for them.

RSS Hub is an open source project that creates RSS feeds from a wide variety of websites, including social media pages. You can install this on your own server, but it is not necessary for most users.

complete article

One of the biggest challenges in implementing an effective social media marketing strategy is time.

When I ask people about their social media strategy for their business, I often get responses like:

complete article

Perhaps the most remarkable but little-remembered story of Facebooks rise to social behemoth is that from 2009 to 2012 it was actually a democracy. Facebook’s users could vocalize the issues affecting them the most and issues that attracted sufficient number of users could actually be placed to a formal vote, with the results legally binding on Facebook itself. While the reality was slightly less utopian, with limits on the kinds of issues that could be brought to a vote, the process was overall a genuine form of democratic representation by Facebook’s users in the sites governance.

Complete Article

In  the summer of 2016, I gave a talk at a small tedx conference in northern Virginia. I began by admitting that I have never had a social-media account; I then outlined arguments for why other people should consider eliminating social media from their lives. The event organizers uploaded the video of my talk to YouTube, where it languished for a few months. Then, for unknowable reasons, it entered the viral slipstream. It was shared repeatedly on Facebook and Instagram and, eventually, viewed more than five million times. I was both pleased and chagrined by the irony of the fact that my anti-social-media talk had found such a large audience on social media.

completed article

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.

complete article

The Facebook Cambridge Analytica revelations changed the way people in the US think about online privacy. And it should come as no surprise that many have grown wary over the mishandling of personal information.

Nearly a year later, a majority of US internet users said that Facebook sharing data with Cambridge Analytica raised some level of concern over how their information is used online, per survey findings from text message marketing company SlickText.

complete article

The way young people use social networks is changing rapidly, partly in response to networks that threaten to take over their lives, that they see as fake, the opposite of social. A while back, it looked like they were abandoning Facebook because it had been taken over by the old folks, but it now turns out they’re just leaving anyway, and not just Facebook, but the whole social media concept.

complete article

One of our readers tells us why Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's film touched her deeply.

Heywood, Andrew, author

Abeyagoonasekera, Asanga, author

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

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

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

Australia

Australian National Audit Office, author

Australia. Parliament. Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, author, issuing body

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