LinkedIn may have started out as a simple way to build professional connections and share contact details, but more users are looking to share articles that interest them, the Digital Media Europe conference heard today.

Isabelle Roughol, France editor for LinkedIn, told delegates that, compared to five years ago, there are five times as many people coming to the site for content than for jobs searches.

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Thanks to a recent update to the Bing News app, Windows 8 now includes a native RSS client. And while the News app is not currently a perfect replacement for Google Reader, which is being retired this summer, it is suddenly a viable option, one that syncs your feeds across multiple PCs.

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There is no harm in arming yourself with information when you need to talk to a doctor. A better informed patient (or a patient’s 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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Did you know that you can rapidly and easily turn any RSS feed into a super cool newspaper style newsletter PDF?

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The national Amber Alert system for missing children -- already on highway billboards, mobile phones and the Internet -- is extending its reach to Facebook, the globes biggest social site.

The Menlo Park social media giant announced Tuesday that it is partnering with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to send geographically targeted Amber Alerts to the members of the U.S. Facebook community.

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One of the interesting qualities of freelancing work is that you may never meet your clients in real life. Perhaps more than any other job market, freelancers rely heavily on their online image- an aggregate of their resume, portfolio and personality to set themselves apart and attract new clients who may very well be located on the other side of the world.

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Android 5 Lollipop has finally brought about lockscreen notifications – preview cards of the users most recent texts, emails, missed calls, and any other messages.

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Based on feedback, the folks in Menlo Park are changing the way it handles updates from your pals. Posts made directly by your friends will now display closer to the top of the News Feed -- things like status updates, pictures, videos and more.

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The Federal Trade Commission rolled out its latest truth in advertising guidelines. The last time the FTC updated its guidelines for truth in advertising was back in 2010. The new guidelines may precede a crackdown for social media marketing.

Their effect on social media marketing includes how marketers handle the use of celebrity endorsements. The FTC recommends that marketers have a proper disclosure check up to make sure that their social media marketing campaigns fall within FTC guidelines.

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Through its latest update, Newsify has been enhanced with its very own companion app for Apple Watch. The extension lets you quickly access the latest articles from your feeds right on your wrist, with indications for unread items and time since last sync.

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Celebrity selfies and fan-snapped shots on the Internet have cut the prices they can charge for their pictures. But those tweets and Instagrams and Facebook posts allow them to track down and trail boldfaced names like never before.

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The end of the year is drawing near, which means its time for fresh starts and new beginnings. While that does apply to whichever New Year’s resolution you plan to make in 2016 (and, in all likelihood, abandon by February), it applies to social media sites as well.

Unfriend and Unfollow
The new year is the perfect time to go through your friends list with a fine-toothed comb. Here is a quick guide for whether you should be friends with someone online: Do you know who this person is? Have you seen him or her in the last year? Do you honestly think you’ll need to talk to him or her in the future?

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The social network is testing multiple News Feeds inside its mobile app, as the feature is live for select users. In addition to the main feed, tabs for specific topics like Style, Travel and Headlines line the top of the interface. When you select one, the feed is distilled down to relevant posts from your friends and Pages you follow. Facebook says the feature is in the testing phase, so it could be a bit before it is open to all users.

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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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According to a study by Pew Research, the number of people who get their news from Facebook and Twitter has increased significantly over the past few years. As of 2015, 63 percent of Facebook users turn to the social platform for their daily news, and the same percent of Twitter users browse news stories via the site.

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When you first launch News, it seems like you can only go through and pick Apple-approved sites and topics. But you can actually customize it however you want in one of two ways:

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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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It is difficult to get real-time alerts about articles with specific headlines on specific subjects from specific websites.

News reader applications like Feedly or Flipboard are great for browsing and even searching through news items, but they lack the ability to send notifications proactively.  Emails from Google Alerts can be tardy, and at other times, articles can slip by completely.

Never fear!  Used together, two web applications, IFTTT and Feed Rinse,  solve this problem easily.

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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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Mobile users spend little time viewing web content on their mobile browsers, preferring to read most of it through their social networks. As a result, publishers are losing control of their content, and users are overloaded with content sources.

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I am involved in several free software projects, including one or two where I maintain the website. For one of those projects, we currently are updating the website. Ours is probably similar to other free software projects. We use a hosting service for several key services, including news, but we run our website on a web server that we own. In our case, we run most of our project on SourceForge and run the website on a third-party service, so the news and website are on different systems.

Not surprisingly, our project uses an RSS feed to pull news items from SourceForge to display on the project website.

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It does not really seem like Apple News has taken off nearly as much as Apple likely hoped it would, but if you only visit a handful of web sites, it is actually a pretty solid RSS reader if you know how to use it right.

When you first launch News, it seems like you can only go through and pick Apple-approved sites and topics. But you can actually customize it however you want in one of two ways:

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According to Mashable, some affected users see an icon on videos that you can tap to toggle sounds or or off. That sounds manageable, and we can imagine people liking the feature. However, other testers are reporting that sounds automatically start up when videos play on their News Feed, so long as their devices aren't on silent mode.

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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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Newsletters are not all bad, but getting them in your email can be a bit disruptive. RSS is a good place for them because you are used to a seeing lot of content in that kind of feed and you can look back on it whenever you want. Kill the Newsletter creates a fake email address for you, then creates a RSS feed for any newsletter you send to that email address. It is a super easy to use system that works really well for anyone still holding onto RSS.

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Facebook, the worlds largest social networking site, has decided to crack down on fake news items after users complained a surge in the number of ill-verified news articles and hoaxes on its network.

Adam Mosseri, VP, News Feed, in a new post, said: We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves, so we are approaching this problem carefully.

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1. Avoid use of headlines and writing of tweets that misrepresent and/or oversimplify the content of linked-to articles. Headlines matter as they frame the stories for users.

2. Call racism racism.

3. Call sexism sexism.

4. Call terrorism terrorism, and be consistent in the use of the term regardless of the ethnicity, religion, national origin and ideological motivation(s) of the perpetrator(s).

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JSON Feed is a new take on the web syndication format, but unlike RSS and Atom it's in JSON, not XML. So what does it try to do better?

Mainly overcome the perils of XML; it's complex, heavyweight, difficult to parse and not in sync with the current trend wanting web data exchange happening almost exclusively in JSON document representation.

In contrast, JSON is easier to both write and parse, manipulate and consume, especially given that its data types are exact reflections of their native Javascript counterparts.

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You would be forgiven for thinking RSS died off with the passing of Google Reader, but our old friend Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) still has a role to play on the web of 2017. It is faster, more efficient, and you will not have to worry as much about accidentally leaking your news reading habit to all your Facebook friends.

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Google News will be deprecating their old RSS feed subscription URLs by December 1, 2017. That means if you have Google News RSS feed subscriptions from a year or so ago, you will need to go through all those subscriptions and update them.

To update your RSS feeds, you need to go to https://news.google.com and select the section you want or create a custom section. At the bottom of the section’s page, click RSS. This will make the feed appear. Copy the URL from the address bar to get the new URL for the RSS feed.

Google told us the old RSS URLs will no longer work effective December 1, 2017.

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JSON Feed is a new take on the web syndication format, but unlike RSS and Atom its in JSON, not XML. So what does it try to do better?
Mainly overcome the perils of XML; its complex, heavyweight, difficult to parse and not in sync with the current trend wanting web data exchange happening almost exclusively in JSON document representation.

In contrast, JSON is easier to both write and parse, manipulate and consume, especially given that its data types are exact reflections of their native Javascript counterparts.

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As Facebook fights its own fake news problem, Twitter looks like it's interested in finding more ways to push news content to its microblogging service. According to a report at BuzzFeed, Twitter has confirmed that it is testing new algorithm-curated timelines when big events happen, then putting tweets from news organizations and other users at the top of your timeline. So far, Twitter says humans are involved in story selection, but a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed that it could be come only algorithmic in the future.

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Facebook began testing a  breaking news label for developing stories back in November, and now the social network is expanding the option to more publishers. Starting this week, the company says 50 more outlets in North America, Latin America, Europe and Australia will be privy to the tag. That is in addition to the small group of local and national publishers that are already using it. If all goes well, Facebook said it may offer the option to even more publishers in the future.

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Earlier this week, we endured another school shooting. This time, in Parkland, Florida, where at least 17 students were killed. During the shooting's aftermath, hoaxes and disinformation spread on Twitter. It is a phenomenon that happens after every tragedy, and it doesn't seem to be going away.

As is common in these cases, many of the initial fake tweets misidentified the gunman.

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Qu Toutiao, which means Fun Headlines in Chinese, is reportedly making its own fun headlines these days, telling sources that it is eyeing an initial public offering that could value it as high as $3 billion.

If successful, it would be an extraordinary valuation for a company, a news and video aggregation mobile app popular in mostly rural areas of China, that was launched less than 2 years ago. The company is considering an IPO in New York as soon as early this year, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.

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Cryptocurrencies are digital currency designed to represent the architecture of the internet. Rather than counting on a standard financial institution to guarantee and verify business deals, cryptocurrency transactions are examined or confirmed, by the computers of the users on the currencys network. The computers used in verifying the deals usually receive little amount of the currency as a reward.

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With the new Google News, they did not just drop the standout tag and editors pick but it seems like the direct method to subscribe to Google News via RSS and Google News keyword searches is gone. There are still ways to subscribe, but the buttons seem to be gone in the new design.

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As Facebook fights its own fake news problem, Twitter looks like its interested in finding more ways to push news content to its microblogging service. According to a report at BuzzFeed, Twitter has confirmed that it is testing new algorithm-curated timelines when big events happen, then putting tweets from news organizations and other users at the top of your timeline. So far, Twitter says humans are involved in story selection, but a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed that it could be come only algorithmic in the future.

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If you want better customer service -- and who doesn't? -- there are strategies, and there are social media strategies.

Like many consumers, Ryan James, has discovered the latter lately. When he needed to arrange a wheelchair for a recent flight from Budapest to Montreal, he skipped the phone just tweeted to Air Canada.

They were so responsive, says a James, college professor from Budapest. Problem solved.

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As Reuben alluded and our sources VERIFY, the claim is false. Facebook did announce, in January, it would be changing its status update philosophy.

The social network explained it is going to try to show users more posts from friends that have "meaningful interactions." It plans to do that by reducing the number of articles and videos that appear on news feeds.

But, Facebook never said it is limiting news feed updates to 25 friends. Rather, the social network is just prioritizing the statuses users will be more inclined to see.

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Enterprise marketers face more challenges than ever in executing their customer-driven, high-ROI strategies. When customers search nowadays, they are looking for more complete and more specific answers provided for their queries: whether they are searching on a smartphone, looking for results specific to their city, or keeping up with the news of the minute. And Google is constantly improving how it delivers those results.

Conductors goal is to make sure the marketing team has all of the data and insights, features, and reporting capabilities customer need—so marketers can deliver for their customers and achieve above and beyond their goals.

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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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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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Google Assistant will soon be capable of delivering a personalized audio news feed after users say OK Google, play the news.

This new feature is a collaborative effort with publishers around the world, which brings the artificial intelligence of Google News to the voice context of Assistant.

Google Assistant will be able to assemble an audio news playlist on demand when users issue the appropriate voice command.

News feeds will be created based on what the individual user cares about. Similar to what happens when opening the Google News app.

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One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes—not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything.

In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don’t want to hear about.

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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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How do you spot a fake?

When users of Microsofts Edge mobile browser visit a news website with a dubious reputation, they will now get a warning to proceed with caution.

As spotted by The Guardian, Microsoft has partnered with the news watchdog organization NewsGuard to provide Edge users with more information about the news veracity of the site they are visiting.

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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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Get updates about volcanoes & earthquakes as RSS feeds

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.

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