From solo entrepreneurs to Main Street businesses and multinational brands, marketers at all levels struggle with finding new ways to keep their followers’ attention. I often see brands fall into the habit of posting repetitive types of content. This usually leads to a sharp drop in engagement.

Your followers need variety. If you don’t mix it up a little bit, you’ll risk losing their attention permanently. To inject some diversity, start working these 10 social post structures into your daily content calendar.

complete article

Almost all news sites have RSS feeds, but many make it difficult to find them. Twitter and Facebook icons are everywhere, but it's rare to see the RSS icon prominently displayed. It's a dot with two quarter-circles fanning out to the top right, usually on an orange background.
complete article

This might be the last article I ever write. I’ve built up a substantial portfolio over the past few years, championing the use of video marketing via carefully considered words of wisdom, offering my two cents on subjects such as why emotive storytelling works in content marketing and how to sell yourself in six seconds.

And now it seems that companies all over world are actually paying attention, practicing what I preach and putting video at the heart of their marketing mantra. Pretty soon, nobody will bother reading or writing anything online as the internet becomes totally submerged by the medium of moving pictures.

complete article

Keeping all of your favorite sites organized is not always easy, especially when you want to stay updated with all of them. That is where RSS feed readers come in. Not familiar with RSS feeds? It is where you compile all of your favorite internet content into one feed, so you do not have to individually be keeping up with health/exercise websites, food blogs, travel diaries, and so on. When you sign up for an RSS feed reader, all those things are in one place.

complete article

The Amazon Kindle is a great ereader, but it is not particularly feature-rich. Reabble is a simple little RSS reader optimized to work inside the Kindles experimental browser to make reading articles less of a chore.

complete article

The best blogs and feeds are those that contain unique, fresh, compelling, content. So where do these prolific posters get their ideas? I talked to a handful of bloggers to determine where their inspiration originated for their content.

Not surprisingly, ideas for blog posts or RSS feed items originate or are influenced by other web content. The following are venues for finding your online muse:

How to Get Ideas for RSS Feeds

This question was put to me by Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Derek Mead and I can not stop thinking about it: What is the smallest code?

complete article

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.

complete article

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.

complete article

Looking for a job for the first time in over a decade can be a lot like trying to date again after getting divorced from a long marriage. You can try to do it the same way you did when you were much younger, but you would have much more success using social media to find the right match. If you are not sure where to start, this list will introduce you to how each major social media channel can help build your personal brand online and network like an all-star.

According to a 2016 survey by CareerBuilder, 59 percent of hiring managers use search engines to research job candidates. If you have no presence online, you will be perceived as being out of touch.

complete article

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).

complete article

Teens spend more time in front of screens than they do sleeping.

According to a 2015 report by Common Sense Media, teens spend upwards of 9 hours a day consuming media on screens. And while the National Sleep Foundation recommends that teenagers get a 9 and 1/2 hours of sleep each night, the average American teenager sleeps around 7 hours each day.

A lack of proper sleep has been connected with reduced cognitive functions and lower academic performance. Teens may be tired because instead of sleeping soundly they are sleeping with their smartphones.

complete article

Not familiar with RSS feeds? It is where you compile all of your favorite internet content into one feed, so you do not have to individually be keeping up with health-exercise websites, food blogs, travel diaries, and so on. When you sign up for an RSS feed reader, all those things are in one place.

complete article

Now, analysts at New Yorks University of Rochester are fighting back with an AI of their own.

The team collected about a quarter of a million unique English tweets from between Sept. 23—the first reported incident of hate-code words—and Oct. 18—a week after the second US presidential election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

There were some interesting observations that we noted.

complete article

RSS really does not get as much love as it used to, and that is actually a shame. Being able to pull stories from multiple sources into one good app is great, especially when you can customize these to show what’s important to you.

The Top 6 RSS Reader Apps for iOS

Twitter is one of the foremost platforms for gaining information quickly as all the major news publications and companies are breaking news about new happening around the world on Twitter.

Scratch that, even influencers, athletes and other celebrities are constantly divulging information on Twitter and many of you might be interested in not missing out on their tweets.

And for those of you who are in a habit of maintaining an RSS reader to consume information from worldwide publications, authors and people you’re interested in hearing from, here is a tool to help you do so on Twitter.

How to Add a Twitter Feed to Your RSS Reader

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

When Google Reader was discontinued four years ago, many technology experts called it the end of RSS feeds.

And it is true that for some people, social media and other aggregation tools are filling a need that feed readers for RSS, Atom, and other syndication formats once served. But old technologies never really die just because new technologies come along, particularly if the new technology does not perfectly replicate all of the use cases of the old one. The target audience for a technology might change a bit, and the tools people use to consume the technology might change, too.

5 open source RSS feed readers

Unlike traditional news feeds that invade user privacy, show ads, and track users across the web, Top Bottom Center is a new content feed that bursts filter bubbles by providing the smartest, funniest, and most flexible news feed ever. Private content feeds give the best information and entertainment, all in one feed.

Content is pulled from a variety of diverse, top-tier sources to give broader perspectives directly from the world's leading thinkers, entertainers, and content producers. Stories feature information from politically and socially diverse sources right next to each other to remove the echo chamber and ideological bubbles of social media.

complete article

It is important for entrepreneurs to understand how social media is evolving and changing -- 2.8 billion people use social media. In terms of advertising new products and services, there are few things more potent and ubiquitous than social media.

complete article

While there may be businesses that specify in SEO, to many, Google Search Engine Optimization remains a mystery. In fact, Google is constantly making changes, refining how they want results to be displayed to its users.

complete article

Those of you who are in a habit of maintaining an RSS reader to consume information from worldwide publications, authors and people you’re interested in hearing from, here is a tool to help you do so on Twitter.

complete article

Your Twitter feed is going to get even busier thanks to the microblogging service unlocking auto-playing video ads for advertisers. Starting today Video Website Cards are available to every ad-buyer. In limited beta tests (like the one embedded below; videos do not seem to work with embeds), Twitter has found them pretty successful, with a 200 percent higher clickthrough rate compared to the leading standard. So yeah, expect to see an awful lot more of these coming soon.

complete article

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.


complete article

What if users did not have to come to your WordPress site in order to read your articles? That would certainly make it easier for users since they would not have to navigate to ten of their favorite blogs and news sources to get their daily information. It would also be nice for the website owners, since it would allow you to distribute your content in a more efficient manner, delivering the content to where the customers want it to be.

complete article

Decisions made by Facebooks human content moderators to weed out hate speech posts are often inconsistent, causing some offensive content to wrongly remain on the platform, according to investigative journalism group ProPublica.

complete article

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.

complete article

RSS is now competing for my time with Twitter, Reddit, internal Verge chats, and other news sources

complete article

CJ Marple wanted to teach his young students how quickly information can spread on the Internet.

So earlier this year, the third-grade science teacher wrote up a tweet with the help of his students, asking for other users to retweet the message, or even reply to the message with their location.

The Kansas teacher says he expected 1,000 or so retweets, but within days the tweet went viral and gained more than 227,000 retweets and 75,000 replies from users all over the world. His students, who are probably a little too young for their own social media accounts, learned a lot that week about the power of social media.

complete article

As you get older, one of the ways life remunerates your increasing irrelevance is you gain a measure of self-knowledge. And I know my brain is, essentially, like a bird pecking at a mirror.

complete article

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.

complete article

RSS is no more gone than email, JavaScript, SQL databases, the command line, or any number of other technologies that various people told me more than a decade ago had numbered days

complete article

Nothing lasts forever, I suppose. In what could be construed as a cruel joke, Digg is pulling the plug on Digg Reader, the company’s answer to the demise of popular RSS service Google Reader. Digg Reader will shut down on March 26th, 2018, giving you just enough time to export your data before the service goes dark.

complete article

Generally speaking, there are two main ways that you can store your RSS feed:

1) On Your Own Website (self-hosting your RSS)
2) On Your Media Host’s Website (the place where you store your files)

The reason why I have often elected for self hosting (option 1 above) is a simple one: 100% control.

complete article

In another blow to RSS fans everywhere, Digg announced that it would soon be shuttering Digg Reader.

As of March 26, the RSS service will no longer work on the web or in Digg's mobile apps. The company didn't say why it was closing the service, which it started in response to Google killing off its own RSS service in 2013.

Naturally, the news was pretty upsetting to Digg Reader fans who had turned to the service as a replacement for the once beloved Google Reader.

But if you are one of the many folks still clinging to RSS feeds in 2018, you are not entirely out of luck. There are a number of capable alternatives out there. Here are five of our favorites.

complete article

RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader last month, or any number of other product failures over the years, the humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence that it is dead, dead, dead.

Now, with Facebook’s  scandal over Cambridge Analytica, there is a whole new wave of commentators calling for RSS to be resuscitated. Brian Barrett at Wired said a week ago that … anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one thats been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It is time to head back to RSS.

RSS is Undead

Instagram announced some changes to user feeds today, but before you get too excited, no it is not a return to the chronological feed.

complete article

Reading the RSS Feeds is a way to keep track of all your favorite blogs and websites. No matter how many websites you have subscribed to, the RSS Feeds bring all the updates in one location for you to read. On the other hand, for the bloggers and website owners, RSS Feeds are the great marketing tool to spread their content to the readers and potential customers. It helps them get a loyal readership and grow their website and businesses.

complete article

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.

complete article

Across 39 countries, a median of 53% say they use online social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. However, that figure conceals large differences around the world, and the relationship between social media use and national wealth is not as strong as it is for overall internet use and smartphone ownership.

complete article

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.

complete article

The ever-expanding size of the world wide web has caused an explosion of content in different horizons. Be it the case of videos, music, or text-based content, billions of netizens gobble loads of content every day.

There is an uncountable number of websites ready to feed you with the daily dose of their interesting articles. You can count us in the list if you want. But how would single human visit tons of websites to slurp all the information? Thankfully, there are ways to so.

complete article

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.

complete article

The network theory of attitudes is a simple idea that has profound implications, if true. This is the theory that when two people hold the same attitude, they are linked together as a result, like two people holding strings to the same balloon. When different people are holding the same bunch of attitudes, they are grouped together and different groups are distinguishable by the different sets of attitudes they are holding.

complete article

If there are tech ideas that refuse to die, then Moodle is the land of the undead. Moodlers have access to a delightful and eclectic variety of tools whose time in the spotlight happened a while ago. Email, Forums, Wikis, Blogs. SCORM could not go without mention. No matter how hard Moodle tries to add a fresh face to it, most Moodle experiences today are evocatively reminiscent of a simpler past. To nicely tie up the rooms in nostalgia, its core is built in PHP, the language that refuses to die.

complete article

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.

complete article

Existing RSS feeds can be repaired and enhanced with FeedForAll.

RSS feeds generated by other means can be automatically repaired, so that they conform to the RSS 2.0 specification. FeedForAll supports RSS feed creation, podcast and videocast creation, management and publishing.

RSS Feed Software

Of the more than 7 billion people on Earth, the number of mobile phone users is approaching 5 billion devices, while toothbrush ownership is closer to 4 billion. Indicating that both marketing of technology and public health have great disparities, but also that leadership in health care are not executing on their brands, social media or marketing. But in the U.S., hospital identity and health branding are paramount for success in a community. By listening to patients, getting feedback on wants and needs, and creating new incentives to engage individuals, increased revenue, greater trust and improved health might be achieved.

Here are 10 surprising things to keep in mind when health care and hospital leadership plan marketing efforts for 2019:

complete article

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.

complete article

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.

complete article