For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

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RSS feeds are fine if you can find a good feed reader and the time to grind through the results, but let’s face it - email is the center of most people’s universes. So why not converge RSS and email? If this sounds like something you would like to do, you need to take a look at the Web service Blogtrottr.

Blogtrottr is simple to use: you enter a feed URL, the address you wish to have the email of the feed sent to, select the frequency of delivery.

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In the early days of search engines, I was not much of a believer in XML sitemaps. But over time, I began to see first hand how they can benefit websites.

XML sitemaps serve as a way to communicate directly with the search engines, alerting them to new or changed content very quickly and helping to ensure that the content is indexed faster.

For content publishers, it has become critical to help Google specifically understand if your site is the original publisher of content. Why? Panda.

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According to the Electronic Transactions Development Agency , a public organisation, Thais usually spend around seven hours a day online and most of that is spent on social media.

This phenomenon has had an impact on many businesses due to the time people are forced to spend on social media, especially content businesses, like news providers, bloggers and websites.

It has also affected the way people get news and other information, with rumours sometimes mistaken for genuine news reports.

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When it comes to telling search engines about the content on a website, webmasters might be wondering if they should submit sitemaps or just setup RSS or Atom feeds.

Googles answer? Use both.

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When it comes to telling search engines about the content on a website, webmasters might be wondering if they should submit sitemaps or just setup RSS or Atom feeds.

Googles answer? Use both.

For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS or Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

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Did you know companies with happy employees outperform their competition by 20 percent?

LinkedIn has carried out research to say that 58 percent of employees are proud of their company and are glad to tell others about it, especially on social media.

This is great news, as happier employees means happier customers, because they pass on their energy & passion in everything they do, including customer support.

But how can you create happy employees on social media?

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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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There was once a time when companies could only see the negative side of social media and as a result many banned the use of it within company hours. However, in more recent years I have witnessed companies becoming increasingly savvy about how to leverage the potential benefits of their employees’ extensive social networks. I have worked with several clients (ranging from blue chip multinationals to smaller more boutique affairs) on how to do just that. Today I want to share with you the ins and outs of implementing your own company-wide social media advocacy program.

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You can keep up-to-date with the content posted on Science Journals by subscribing to their E-mail alerts and RSS feeds.

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Since January, more than 200,000 posts per month on Instagram, a picture-sharing app owned by Facebook, have been tagged with #ad,  #sp or #sponsored, according to Captiv8, an analytics platform that connects brands to social media influencers. Hiring such influencers allows companies to reach a vast network of potential customers: Mr Ronaldo has a combined following of 240m people across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

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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

Back in the late 90s, when standards were proprietary and communication protocols complicated, two data formats appeared on the horizon. The first was the extensible markup language, born as an extension of an existing markup language standard (XML), and designed (by an open committee) with the purpose of storing and defining documents and data through the optional use of a schema.  The other, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), born out of a programming language, was almost the exact opposite – a serialization format with requirements so simple they fit on the back of a business card. XML exploded in application development and communication platforms in the 2000s due in large part to the sheer demand for a human readable, vendor-neutral data format that was easy to read, write and share. As applications and platforms evolved and efficiency grew in priority, APIs evolved to become leaner, and JSON overtook XML as the preferred data interchange format among developers across many technology stacks.

JSON vs. XML: The battle for format supremacy may be wasted energy

Google loves XML Sitemaps, it gives their bots an easy way to discover all your content. Even better, it gives webmasters a way to see how many of their URLs in their sitemap file were indexed and which URLs were not. But when it comes to how you should structure your XML sitemap file, that is totally up to you.

Structure Your XML Sitemap As You Like

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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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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Facebook is taking a hard look at the impact it has on the democratic process after announcing it could no longer guarantee that social media is beneficial to democracy. One critique of social media is the ability to create echo chambers -- online spaces that only surround users with like-minded people and ideas.

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As of December 2017, the new Google Sites lets you embed HTML and JavaScript, as well as other websites. That is a big change from a year ago when the new Google Sites mostly let you share items from Drive, YouTube, and a few other Google sources.

The changes make the new Google Sites an even more useful website and intranet site creation tool.

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Sure, we all get information from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

But a growing trend of law enforcement using social media to communicate with the public has led to growing concerns that they are not responding to questions from journalists or not being fully transparent with the public.

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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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Techmeme, the online aggregator of record for technology industry news, is adding some audio in the form of a podcast: the Techmeme Ride Home.

Beginning today, the site’s new podcast will appear at 5 p.m. every weekday. Over 20 minutes, host Brian McCullough (from The Internet History podcast) will summarize the day’s top tech news and commentary from around the web and social media.

Plain-vanilla news aggregation is unusual in podcasts. Even in tech, podcasts tend to be personality-driven, more often involving hosts providing commentary on the big news of the week rather than just the news itself. McCullough thinks Techmeme can offer something different.

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Everybody uses Facebook because everybody uses Facebook.

But lately Facebook — and all the other social networks, for that matter — seems to be turning into a distracting, time-wasting and manipulative surveillance machine that does more harm than good.

This is a huge problem for professionals and businesses of all sizes, including enterprises.

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The perfect social network would have the following characteristics:

It would have a lot of users — at least as many as Facebook.
It would filter spam and harassment, but otherwise not algorithmically sort or filter.
It would enable us to interact with people on all the social networks.
It would have no advertising.
It would be user-controllable and user-automatable.
It would be usable on both mobile and desktop.
It would have great search (unlike Facebook).

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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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Facebook purged  583 million fake accounts in the first three months of 2018, demonstrating the amount of spam, violent content and hate speech that gets smeared across the social network.

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In 2015-16, roughly four-in-ten adults across the emerging nations surveyed by Pew said they used social networking sites, and as of 2017, a majority (53%) use social media. Whereas, over the same period, social media use has generally been flat in many of the advanced economies surveyed.

Internet use and smartphone ownership have also stayed level in developed markets over the same period vs rising in emerging economies.

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The biggest mistake people make when promoting their brand, company or even themselves on social media is thinking that simply posting is enough. However, that’s far from the case. Managing a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter account means having to strategize ways to keep your current audience captivated, while simultaneously attracting new users to your page.

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Mozillas current plan aims for a removal of both features in Firefox 63 or Firefox 64, out October or December 2018. The change won't affect the current Firefox 60 ESR version but the next Firefox ESR after Firefox 60 ESR won't support both features anymore as well.

We published an overview of Live Bookmarks in 2014, but Firefox supported the feature for much longer. Live Bookmarks allowed Firefox users to subscribe to a site's RSS feed so that new articles would be displayed in a bookmarks folder in the web browser.

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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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Talent drives engagement when it comes to posts from social media accounts owned by TV shows and networks.

According to Nielsen, which earlier this year started measuring Owned Account Performance as part of its Nielsen Social Content Ratings talent accounts generated almost 20 million engagements for their associated TV programs.

That represents about 30% of all owned engagement for series and special programming.

For a three-week period during this year’s fall series premieres, Nielsen Social Content Ratings measured over 160,000 pieces of TV content and over 250 million engagements coming from thousands of active owned accounts.

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RSS feeds has had another nail in the coffin, as Mozilla has decided to stop supporting the technology in their Firefox browser.

According to Mozilla the feature has low usage, and removing it will mean fewer resources spent on securing and maintaining the feature.

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Contractor complaints and safety concerns with smartphone apps were among what the ABC 7 I-Team found to be the top three consumer complaints in 2018.

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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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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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Live Bookmarks combines Firefoxs bookmarking functionality with the dynamic nature of RSS feeds to create auto-updating bookmark folders that list all recent entries from RSS feeds.

The removal causes quite the issues for users who make use of the feature. Mozilla announced that it plans to export the list of feeds to an OPML file which the majority of RSS readers support.

While there are some alternatives that might work for some users, there was not a real solution to regain the functionality once it is removed.

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I say social media engagement metrics, what comes to your mind first?

Most likely it will be likes, comments, and shares.

While these certainly are high-level indicators of content engagement, and (presumably) the effectiveness of your social media efforts, they are far from the only metrics you should consider.

This section will help you understand the full spectrum of metrics available to you for evaluating your content and social media marketing, the meaning and importance of each, and how to use and improve them.

Few will need to keep track of all these metrics, so choose the mix that gives you the most valuable information.

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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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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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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:

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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.

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In March, in the aftermath of the Christchurch shooting, I tried to distinguish between internet problems and platform problems. Internet problems arise from the existence of a free and open network that connects most of the world; platform problems arise from features native to the platform. The fact that anti-vaccination zealots can meet online is an internet problem; the fact that Facebook recommended that new mothers join anti-vaccination groups is a platform problem.

The recent rise in white supremacist violence around the world has given us fresh reason to ask which aspects of the problem belong to the entire internet, and which belong to our biggest social networks. It seems apparent that the internet is cultivating loose but potent networks of extremists. But what are the mechanics of this radicalization? And what role could platforms play in discouraging it?

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

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

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

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

Webster, Andrew, (Professor of European history), author