Are you tired of Facebooks trending section in your News Feed? Celebrity news getting annoying? Would you rather have legitimate news? Introducing Fluffblocker.

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You turn to RSS. That is right, we are going old school. For those who don't know, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It's a very easy protocol that allows feeds to be pulled from websites to serve up a collection of story summations that the reader can then click on and enjoy the full read.

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Although consumers want brands to use social media as a two-way communication channel, the vast majority of businesses are not adhering to those desires, according to a study from social media management software provider Sprout Social. On average, businesses send out 23 promotional messages for every one consumer response.

Social media is now the No. 1 way consumers interact with businesses. The research revealed that 34.5 percent of consumers turn to social media first when they have a problem, compared with just 16 percent who call and 5 percent who visit a store in person.

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The federal government has confirmed that it will start targeting social media posts by prospective employees as part of its review process for security clearance.

The new policy, which will allow investigators to scan an applicant’s history on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other similar sites, will be adopted soon, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

The guidelines make clear that agencies can target publicly available social media posts, if they deem it necessary, but cannot force individuals to hand over their passwords for private accounts, or provide pseudonyms for any profiles.

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I was interviewing Antonio Lucio, the CMO for HP, for my CMO Insight series (see article here), when we started talking about social media. For perspective, Lucio has over 33,000 Twitter followers, has a 62 Klout score, and is the 4th most influential CMO on Twitter (see list here). I asked him why he is so personally involved in Twitter. Very few CMOs tweet and of those who have a lot of followers, few tweet themselves, instead delegating the task to somebody on their marketing team. His response to my question was fascinating, and an important one for any CMO or aspiring CMO to hear.

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New-age publishers are toying with innovative content models that offer more value to end users and set their cash registers ringing. It does not come as a surprise, when content is evolving as a major source of income for them. By offering high-value content and a trove of inbound links, digital publishers can maximise the profitability of their websites.

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Influencer Marketing

According to the latest Nielson study, over 90% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family. We have slapped a fancy name on it, but at the end of the day, this is what influencer marketing really is: getting products into the hands of people whom others trust. Peer recommendations have the power to sway buyers and inspire purchase decisions, not because they have a zillion followers or have perfect lips, but because they are reliable, personable sources we believe.

One lesser known feature of Reddit is the ability to display all submissions that a domain or site received on Reddit.

I mentioned this option two years ago for the first time and don't want to rehash everything I said in the previous article.

You may have stumbled upon it accidentally by clicking on the domain link next to submissions that lead to external sites as it will display the feed of that domain directly.

The feature is quite useful for a number of reasons. As a webmaster for instance, it is easy enough to check all the direct mentions of your site on Reddit.

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In what has become a heartbreaking routine—employed during the Paris attacks of 2015, as well as after recent terrorist attacks in such places as Belgium and Istanbul — people shared emotional memes in solidarity with the city of Nice, where 84 people were killed by a truck driver barrelling into the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais.

Using the hashtags #PrayForNice or #JeSuisNice, people expressed solidarity over the deaths of at least 84 people, which French President Francois Hollande says was caused by an act of terrorism.

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With Lines IPO, I thought this would be a good time to ask about the role that new social networks will play in the larger social network ecosystem. Will they cannibalize Facebook’s usage? Or can we expect to see the biggest players continue to be dominant in social networking?

For those of you who don’t know, social networking has a special place in my heart. In 1997, I launched the world’s first online social network called sixdegrees. And as part of that, we wrote a patent that defined a social network as the ability to index multiple relationships in a single database. It gives you the ability to see the people you don’t know through the people you do know.

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The former Top Gear crew seem to be embracing the internet in a whole new way. Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond have announced that their new social network, DriveTribe, will be launching this autumn.

Details are scarce, but each of the founders shared a quote of what they would like to see from this new venture.

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Do you want to exclude specific categories from RSS feed on your WordPress site? Many site owners use some categories for content that they don’t want to appear in the RSS feed of their site. In this article, we will show you how to exclude specific categories from WordPress RSS feed.

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I had never heard of Nextdoor when I lived in New York City. Social media services catering to individual neighborhoods weren’t useful in an apartment building where most tenants lasted a year, and longtime residents kept to themselves.

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Last week, a prominent feminist writer left Twitter after a rape and death threat was directed at her 5-year-old daughter. Online violent threats are not uncommon, especially for women and minorities, but when they are reported, police are often not responsive.

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Displaying your social media network activity on your website can have tremendous advantages. It shows your readers that you’re an active participant in your niche and helps you establish yourself as a thought leader. The best part is that displaying your activity is fast and easy in WordPress.

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When Google killed Reader back in 2013, many people worried that it was the end of RSS feeds—an open source format that websites used to syndicate their posts automatically. Instead, it actually led to a huge degree of innovation. Now, three years later, things have never been better.

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If you want to increase the readership on your website, or you want to make it big with a podcast, you need an RSS feed. The RSS feed keeps your users up to date on all of your latest articles or episodes and can result in a massive increase in traffic. Creating an RSS feed is quick and easy, whether you’re using an RSS creation program or writing one yourself. Follow this guide to find out how.

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Did you know that there are thousands of people out there earning incredible amounts of money through social media? That s right, social media stars can make thousands, even millions of dollars per year through sponsored posts, original content, and consistent engagement with their followers. Here are five social media celebs who might make you want to quit your job to go full-time on Instagram!

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Use a Conversational tone On Facebook
Facebook is probably the only site that still holds that perfect mix of business and pleasure. In order to not upset that balance and lose followers, your posts and updates should blend in perfectly with your fans and encourage more click-through. While repurposing Facebook for marketing, make sure to use a conversational tone to sound less spammy.

Follow the 80/20 Rule
Just making your presence felt over social media is not enough, it has to be worth following in the first place. Make sure to post valuable, productive and useful content instead of just promoting your company. The most useful tip to keep in mind is the 80/20 rule, where 80 percent of all your posts should be of value to your audience and 20 percent will be self-promotional.

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You read all the social media guru blogs, post religiously across your social media channels, and even publish your content at peak times of the day to capture more views. Despite all of this, you still see competitors gaining ground while your social media influence remains stagnant.

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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.

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Whether you are constantly searching your own name online (you know who you are) or there is a topic you want to follow closely, Google Alerts lets you know when new pages hit the web that match your query—and you can convert these results into an RSS feed (or something else) to make them easier to manage.

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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.

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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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Despite the huge popularity of social networking among teens, more respondents reported using Gmail than Snapchat or Facebook, June 2016 research uncovered. The only site used more than Gmail was YouTube, which is not surprising given the plethora of content and influencers available on the video-sharing site.

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Registering to vote just got a whole lot easier for tens of million social media users in the U.S. At least six major social media apps are launching voter registration drives to meet young voters exactly where they spend much of their time: on their phones.

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This summer, the American Civil Liberties Union of California requested records from 63 police departments, sheriffs and district attorneys across California. Of the records they received, 40 percent of the agencies (20) used social media surveillance tools, and most of them started using them within the last year.

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Ladies, gentlemen and all overly anxious Jewish mothers, I recently had a date that was NOT set up via a dating app. Hey, you have to start somewhere, right? Even better, it was a great date.

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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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Parents have plenty of reasons to worry about what their kids do online.

Dangers seem to lurk in every corner of connected life, especially for children. Remember that federal regulation prohibits children under the age of 13 from joining most social networking sites. Even so, more than 20,000 kids try to sneak their way onto Facebook — with or without their parents help — every single day.

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Social media nurturing has to be a requirement for all businesses. Businesses have turned social media automation into something that seems to resemble broadcast radio by posting large volumes of tweets and updates occurs fast with automation tools. Now imagine every business, regardless of their industry, doing the exact same thing.

Automated postings have inundated social communities to a point that no one is listening anymore.

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

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Predicting the future is hardly a precise science, but identifying macro trends and developments can be done by paying close attention to what is happening in an industry. Here is what a handful of small businesses, startups and analysts are seeing in their crystal balls.

1. We will hear more about how autonomous cars connect to the network.
2. Funding will skew toward artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). And most of it will be a bust.
3. Mobile will continue to rise as the primary shopping platform.

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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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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.

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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.

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Displaying your social media network activity on your website can have tremendous advantages. It shows your readers that you are an active participant in your niche and helps you establish yourself as a thought leader. The best part is that displaying your activity is fast and easy in WordPress.

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In Manilla a  technology law expert casts doubt on the effectiveness of House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez's proposed bill seeking to regulate social media use in the Philippines.

Under House Bill 5012, a person can be penalized for creating a social media account using someone elses identity. Alvarezs proposed measure also mandates social media networks to verify the identity of their users.

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Last week, the APA released a study finding that Americans were experiencing the first statistically significant stress increase in the surveys 10-year history. In January, 57 percent of respondents of all political stripes said the U.S. political climate was a very or somewhat significant source of stress, up from 52 percent who said the same thing in August.

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If you have ever bought an item that a celebrity recommended on Twitter or been persuaded by a discussion with a Facebook friend, you know that social media can impact your behavior and opinions. But you might be surprised to know that there is a science behind social media interactions.

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Anyone who has invested time managing and growing a social media following knows that it can turn into a time vacuum. Open up Instagram and suddenly you find yourself scrolling through beautiful photos from your friends excursion to Iceland. Those ponies are so photogenic with their manes blowing in the icy wind! Logging in, posting and getting out without being distracted is a challenge even the most self-disciplined struggle with.

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If millennials are the yardstick by which we measure what drives communication on social media, then it would seem that all eyes should be on social messaging platforms such as WhatsApp this year. This is the view of Dominique Pienaar, CEO of DUO Marketing & Communications, who says these platforms are becoming increasingly popular due largely to the immediacy of contact and response and are certainly preferred platforms among the millennial market when it comes to one on one, broadcast and group communication.

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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

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

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

As of this year, about 81% of the United States population uses at least one social media platform. That number is growing by roughly 5% per year. At this rate, 100% of the United States will have a social media profile on at least one platform by 2021.  

Businesspeople searching for the ideal marketing channel to engage prospects should look no further than social networks. Social media provides companies with ample information to create messages targeted to valuable niche audiences, and given the statistics, it is inevitable that the audience you are trying to reach is on at least one social network.

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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

Social media is everywhere. The big players in the industry carry billions of users and boast massive layers of data and content. These days, though, social media may be in for a major change, possibly due to the rise of blockchain.

Will Blockchain Reinvent Social Media?