A report yesterday revealed that Amazon might open up its Alexa ecosystem to allow push notifications, so that it could interrupt to warn you about a traffic jam, for instance.

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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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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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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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Threats to humiliate an intimate partner by sharing explicit photos or video is an old problem with a new digital twist, a new study finds.

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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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Twitterfeed is Going Away – Dlvr.it is Here to Stay. Now that I got that out, lets talk about social media automation and RSS feeds. Keeping social media accounts active is one of the most important components of having success with social media.

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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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If Uber is going to make its dreams of self-driving ridesharing cars a reality, it is going to need a lot of expertise in artificial intelligence... and it is taking big steps to make that happen. The company has created Uber AI Labs to fuel its research, and it is getting the team started by acquiring AI startup Geometric Intelligence.

This is also a preemptive strike against the competition. The company tells the NYT that there is a fierce battle for AI talent -- acquiring Geometric Intelligence prevents Uber from losing out to Lyft, Google and others hoping to put machine learning to work on the road.

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To get started with Feed Hawk, you need to subscribe to one of the RSS feed services listed above. Next, sign into your feed service in Feed Hawk

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Is Facebook our ultimate utopia, where failures find no room?

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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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The US government has begun requesting foreign travelers to submit their social media information to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) before traveling into the country. The practice is claimed to be part of broader efforts to identify potential terrorist threats.

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No matter how popular your blog is, it won't make money if you do not monetize it. And even a well-designed and monetized blog can not make money if you do not know how to promote it. Too many recent posts on this topic have failed to point out that what works for the rich and famous is unlikely to work for your small business.

When Neil Patel writes about how to create a blog and mentions that his site earns over $1 million dollars a year, I hope people realize that even when he did this with a brand-new blog, he is still the well-respected, world-famous Neil Patel.

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Chances are if you are in sales, social media is already a prominent part of your personal life. And now, thanks to social selling, it is hopefully a big part of your professional life as well. Incorporating social media into the workplace has brought many opportunities, but also many questions. You may be wondering how to best navigate social networks with your sales prospecting goals in mind.

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Dlvr.it is Here to Stay. Now that I got that out, lets talk about social media automation and RSS feeds. Keeping social media accounts active is one of the most important components of having success with social media. With that in mind, I am going to introduce you to a great RSS feeding tool called dlvr.it. Dlvr.it is used to RSS feed posts to your social media accounts.

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

Although Facebook is the most popular social network across generations, it is not as dominant with younger people as it is with older ones, according to recent research from Sprout Social.

The report was based on data from a survey conducted in January 2017 of 1,000 Millennials (age 18-34), Gen Xers (age 34-54), and Baby Boomers (age 55+) in the United States.

Some of 65% of Gen Xers as well as Baby Boomers say Facebook is their favorite social network.

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What was once a world of snail mail, magazines, and newspapers is now a world of cell phones, email and social media. There is no mistaking the up rise and importance of new technology in what is now a digital age. In the past, advertising was a more simplified process. You could advertise in a newspaper or magazine, or leave flyers on someone’s doorstep or mailbox. You could buy air time for a commercial or buy space on a billboard. However, as technology grew and evolved, so did our methods of advertising.

What should I do to advertise my business?

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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

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?

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

Time is an entrepreneurs most valuable and elusive resource. Seizing the day seems like an impossible task, and staying organized is a constant battle. Many software solutions have tried to solve the eternal entrepreneurial bottleneck, and some of them have succeeded in creating effective solutions

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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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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.

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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.

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Facebook is adding to its collection of apps. This time, a social network called tbh, popular with teens.

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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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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.

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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.

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Happy New Year! Are you looking to reach and engage with customers in a new and exciting way? This is going to be the year your business embraces content marketing in a real and serious way. Why is this going to be the year of content marketing?

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Writing sells.

You don’t have to be the worlds foremost wordsmith to produce effective content, but improving your writing will make you more successful at work.

Here are some tips:

1. Know your audience.

You are not just writing for yourself, are you? You should be creating content for others, and it’s imperative to understand the people you are writing for. Whats useful for them? What might help them in their jobs?

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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.

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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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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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For years, we have known that social media platforms inspire jealousy. A 2013 study showed that people fall into a spiral of envy when Facebook reveals that their friends are excelling or leading glamorous lives. Scientific American reported that many studies indicate that spending a lot of time on Facebook is linked to diminished well-being, with Facebook-inspired envy increasing feelings of depression. FOMO (fear of missing out) has become a very real thing

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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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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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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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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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Fears about the potential effects of propaganda and fake news remain high, and American officials are determined to keep track of media outlets in a bid to curb these misinformation campaigns. The Department of Homeland Security has put out a call for companies that could create a database tracking over 290,000 media influencers around the world, including online news outlets, bloggers and prominent social network accounts. The system would identify contributor details (such as contact info and their employers), and would allow searching for individuals and outlets through categories like their locations, the focuses of their coverage and their sentiment.

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The appropriate frustration and disappointment resulting from the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica disclosures are making it easy to forget the personal and economic benefits of social media.

For example, let’s not forget that we choose to integrate these services into our daily lives because they allow us to deepen social connections and enable us to exercise our individual agency in a fashion that was impossible before their emergence. Or that these services have created millions of jobs, new business ecosystems and helped fuel the rise of the digital economy that brings broad societal benefit.

But it is important not to forget the learning of lessons and the hoped-for change. We are seeing some of these changes now. There is no playbook for addressing the principles at play here, and so it will not be all smooth sailing. But you can be certain that the effort will be earnest and that these services will be better as a result.

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People are angry at Facebook. People are angry at YouTube. People are angry at Twitter.

With Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set to testify before Congress less than a week after an enraged YouTube user wounded three people before killing herself at the companys headquarters, the growing debate over what Silicon Valley’s social media giants do with the content and information we give them has hit a new pitch.

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Facebook announced a new initiative today aimed at improving its policies and the role its platform plays in elections. The company acknowledged that it was slow to respond to election interference efforts that took place on its site and says it wants to learn more about social medias role in elections around the world. To do that, it's putting together a group of researchers that will then develop a research plan, get proposals for projects that address issues defined in its plan and manage a peer review process that will determine who will receive funding and access to Facebook data for their research.

The commission of experts will initially work for one year and Facebook says membership will be determined soon.

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Convinced that faith communities would want to share prayer requests, announcements and service opportunities without going to multiple platforms and without being awash in advertising, a group of friends created an app just for that.

With $2 million in seed money, Pray.com was beta tested with 100 churches in 2016. Today, 6,000 faith communities and thousands of other groups use the app to host their members’ need for prayer and offers of support, as well as to recruit volunteers for local service projects and to collect donations, said two of the co-founders.

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Most organisations believe social media has a role to play in their marketing communications, but, equally, most would struggle to explain exactly what that role is. There’s little doubt that social media takes up a significant amount of consumer time and attention but without understanding the influence and quantifying the commercial benefits for brands and businesses, no marketing activity should be above question.

Like every other marketing activity, a social media strategy must be judged on its positive impact on business or brand metrics.

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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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Blockchain has gained increasing popularity over the past year. Having begun as the technology behind cryptocurrency exchanges, it has now shown promise in almost every other sector of the economy as it’s a secure, reliable and tamper-proof way of recording transactions and exchanging data.

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Twitter is cracking down on bots after it announced changes to its API that will massively reduce the impact of services that allow links and content to be shared across multiple accounts, i.e. the software that powers Twitter bots.

So that means an end to services that let those controlling large numbers of accounts to batch tweet, follow users, retweet or like tweets. Twitter will continue to allow content to be posted to accounts using software, for example, weather alerts, RSS feed updates and more, but they will now be limited to a single account going forward.

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A good way to go about automated tweeting is to use Google News. However, that should be used only if you’re in for a niche subject. If you use a keyword like technology, there will be too much chaos and a too high frequency of content going out.

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