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.

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Today, almost every business has a website -- the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker alike. If you are happy with the number of customers you currently have, then do not read this article. If you would like to bring your products to new markets, read on.

There is a catch: Getting more quality traffic means you will have to do some work.

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The U.S. is quickly becoming a podcast nation. According to a 2017 survey, nearly 25 percent of Americans — around 68 million — said they listened to podcasts. Forty-two percent were even willing to pay to do so. The largest contingent of podcast listeners (44 percent) are millennials, and that coveted cohort's tuned-in attention has attracted advertisers, whose podcast-generated revenue rose from $69 million in 2015 to $220 million in 2017. In the last four years alone, the popularity of podcast listening has doubled.

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Gray Hat SEO is an SEO practice that's riskier than White Hat SEO, but one that may or may not result in your site being banned from search engines and their affiliate sites. Generally, Gray Hat SEO practices belong in neither the Black Hat nor White Hat category because the terms of service regarding the issue are unclear. In this tutorial, you will get the answers to the following questions:

What is Gray Hat SEO?
Why does it matter?
What Gray Hat SEO should mean to you

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You have none of the usual constraints of traditional forms of media in terms of length, deadlines, format or language.

Plus -- and this is no small plus -- podcast listeners are some of the most loyal consumers of any form of media available today. If they listen once, they're likely to come back, again and again.

There are multiple reasons for that, and multiple ways to do it well, which we'll explore below.

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Podcasting is going Hollywood.

Over the past year, HowStuffWorks, Gimlet and Wondery have stepped up their search for content that can be adapted into film, television, or even books as production studios snap up podcasts for high-profile films and cable TV series with A-list talent like Julia Roberts, Connie Britton and Eric Bana.

Gimlet Media, the startup that began selling film and TV rights to its shows last year, has already exceeded every 2018 goal it had set for Gimlet Pictures, said its head, Chris Giliberti.

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A lot of business owners think SEO--search engine optimization, or the art of promoting your content on search engines without paying for it--and keywords are something you can sprinkle onto a website like magical fairy dust after it is built. Unfortunately, that is just not the case. To rank on Google, search engine optimization needs to be more than an afterthought—SEO needs to be built right into your website’s structure.

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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

Every parent that has a teen or a preteen should have both Snapchat and Instagram on their phones. If their child uses those applications, you should follow your child on those applications and I think having constant conversations with kids about responsible social media use is important, said Haase.

If they want their child to use social media responsibly, Haase said the parent needs to model good social media behavior as well.

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Wish you could follow a couple of Twitter or Instagram users, without setting up an account? Create an RSS feed for them.

RSS Hub is an open source project that creates RSS feeds from a wide variety of websites, including social media pages. You can install this on your own server, but it’s not necessary for most users.

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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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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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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

Some users may like the idea of subscribing to Instagram users using RSS. While that is good only for public posts that these users make on Instagram, it is a great way of keeping an eye on new posts of any number of users.

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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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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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Mozilla to kill off RSS features in Firefox because they're hardly used and would take too much effort to modernize.

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Ever since it started existing, governments have had a love-hate relationship with social media. Predictably, the romance starts to sour when social media contains criticism of the government as it often does and the affair blooms when the opposite happens, in particular when sycophancy takes on gargantuan proportions. In our particular case, only days before the elections, we have a peculiar situation where social media is being manipulated with the seeming intention of bringing about a certain outcome in the polls.

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Nearly two months ago, Twitter began testing a feature that made it easier for users to see the latest tweets on their feed first, rather than the ones pushed by the companys algorithm. It is a toggle dressed as a sparkle icon that lives above the home timeline, which keeps you from having to go deep into your Twitter settings to get that purely chronological view. Certain iOS users have had access to this since October, but today Twitter is making the change permanent and rolling it out to everyone on Apples platform. Twitter's Android app as well as its website are getting the new magic button, too, but that won't be coming until after the holidays.

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Every company marketer posting on social media is curious about the best times to post their content. While each audience is unique, having a rule of thumb can be extremely helpful when you are first starting out. Sprout Social recently published the results of their Best Times to Post on Social Media: 2018 Industry Research, a report which includes preferred time slots for the big 4 — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

Some users may like the idea of subscribing to Instagram users using RSS. While that is good only for public posts that these users make on Instagram, it is a great way of keeping an eye on new posts of any number of users.

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Carmel Fire took to their Facebook page to notify people that they should not be putting their own spin online regarding situations like Wednesdays explosion at the high school. CFD went on to add that people were posting pictures of patients and minors from the scene.

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Pinterest has updated its chronological feed with a redesign as well as an easier way to visit publishers web pages.

These updates can be found in the Following tab, introduced earlier this year, which only contains pins from accounts that a user has chosen to follow.

By comparison, the main Pinterest feed contains a mix of pins from followed accounts as well as algorithmic recommendations.

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Hootsuite, the master of everything social, has released a report detailing its predictions for the future of social media trends in 2019, and it is a must-read. After surveying thousands of customers and consulting with several top-notch market research firms, Hootsuite has distilled some crucial information and understanding for every business owner, large and small.

The information they reviewed covers just about anything and everything one could think to ask about when it comes to social media, from the best way to channel customer service to big-picture ideas for customer relations overall. The top social media trends for 2019, then, can be understood very specifically, and very broadly.

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The modern web contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there is no panacea for what ails this internet we have built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.

For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader, which went the way of the ghost this month.

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Firefox maker Mozilla will kill off support for RSS and Atom feeds in this December's release of Firefox 64.

Along with dropping RSS and Atom syndicated-feed support, Firefox 64 will no longer contain the Live Bookmarks feature for subscribing to RSS feeds, nor the feed-preview feature.

Instead of maintaining built-in RSS support, Mozilla believes users should install RSS-reader Firefox add-ons.

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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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GitHub is the number one signal in my API world. The activity that occurs via GitHub is more important than anything I find across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social channels. Commits to repositories and the other social activity that occurs around coding projects are infinitely more valuable, and telling, regarding what a company is up to than the deliberate social media signals blasted out via other channels. I’m always working to dial in my monitoring of GitHub using the GitHub API, but also via the RSS feeds that are present on the public side of the platform.

I feel RSS is often overlooked as an API data source, but I find that RSS is not only alive and well in 2018, it is something that is actively used on many platforms.

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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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A long-running feud was thrust back into the spotlight today with a contentious report claiming that over half of Facebooks monthly active users are actually fake.  

The report, written by Facebook critic Aaron Greenspan, alleges that the social media giant has no way to accurately measure its true user base — or in other words, accounts that are matched up to real people — and that Facebooks reported metrics substantially overestimate the number of real monthly active users.

Notably, Greenspan is a former Harvard classmate of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I

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I am blessed to say that I get to wake up and live out my dreams each day, says social media influencer, comedian and actress Lala Milan. She creates content for many platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as various apps, doing almost all of the writing, filming, directing, and editing herself. This career has enabled her to generate a six-figure annual income and secured her celebrity bookings at events. Recently, it landed her a role on Boomerang, a TV series coming to BET in February 2019.

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Just because you are not on Facebook or Twitter does not mean your data is safe from the social media giants or their prying algorithms. A study from the University of Vermont adds yet more evidence to the argument that your privacy is no longer in your hands, even if you abstain from social media.

Researchers from UVM's Department of Mathematics and Statistics published a paper in this week’s issue of the journal Nature Human Behaviour demonstrating that social media users not only generate substantial behavioral data about themselves but also about members of their social circle.

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Amazon is now letting anyone create and publish Alexa skills into the Alexa skills store. Amazon first made it easy to create custom skills last year with its Alexa Skill Blueprints program, and it’s taking those custom responses and allowing them to be published in the store for everyone to download and use. There are currently more than 80,000 existing Alexa skills in the store, but todays announcement means the store will be growing significantly with user-generated custom skills.

Amazon is primarily aiming this new functionality at content creators, businesses, brands, and other organizations. Publications, local sports teams, YouTubers, and others will all be able to broadcast their latest updates by simply adding a recorded audio feed URL to a blueprint skill directly and then publishing it on the store.

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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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Earlier, it had been proposed that, due to its social functions, the mobile phone has become associated with the meaning of social relationships. Mobile phones social function is clear. People use them to maintain relationships and to feel connected and closer to friends and family members. We wanted to test if the mental representation of a mobile phone is indeed associated with the mental representation of social relationships. We thus conducted an experiment where we primed the concept of mobile phone and then measured if it activated, that is, made social relationship-related thoughts more accessible.

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March 13, millions of Facebook and Instagram users turned to Twitter to express their exasperation about the social media networks massive failure.

While many users observations were farcical in nature, there are very real economic ramifications for two of the worlds largest social media networks being offline for a significant amount of time.

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Google is set to begin deleting data from its beleaguered social network, Google+ in April, but before that happens, the Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam say that they are working to preserve public posts on the platform before they vanish forever.

In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won’t be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted.

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Are you looking for ways to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts? Want to know if your social media campaigns are worth your time and effort?

The team from Social Success Marketing share the metrics you can, and should, track in this infographic.

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While the social media landscape is always changing, the fundamental building blocks of an effective strategy remain the same. Without them, you're likely wasting your time - or at the least, you're not seeing optimal results from your efforts to connect and engage with your online audience.

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In todays climate of hyper-competitive technologies, the ways that technology is sold often has much more to do with how a brand is perceived and the cultural relationships that this brand has to an imaginary field of power much more than how good a brand actually is. Where social influencers have far more sway with younger consumers than celebrity endorsements, how do they fit into the greater social fabric that necessitates that not only items are bought and sold, but which nurtures a cultural connection between the object and a deeper ethos that speaks to us as individuals? In essence, what makes the social influencer integral to new tech culture today and what are the indicators of their value or, according to some critics, that their time is up?

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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

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The great promise of social media was that by giving voice to ordinary people all across the world, their collective experiences and expertise would help society reach a higher consciousness. Much as the web was bringing together the world of knowledge, social media would bring together our diverse perspectives and especially the vast wealth of uncodified human knowledge. The reality, as we all know, has been quite the opposite: a toxic cesspool of hate and stupidity, where the loudest and most obnoxious one wins and enlightened insight is overwhelmed by emotional sarcasm and toxicity. Is there any hope for a social future?

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As it prepares to go public under the ticker PINS after filing its S-1 to the Securities Exchange Commission today (March 22), Pinterest said it would rather not be seen as a place like Facebook or Twitter.

The cold shoulder makes sense: Sites that algorithmically serve up content—Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram, and Twitter—remain under fire for their inability to moderate the environments on their own platforms.

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RSS Feeds for StreamingMedia.com

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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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Wish you could follow a couple of Twitter or Instagram users, without setting up an account? Create an RSS feed for them.

RSS Hub is an open source project that creates RSS feeds from a wide variety of websites, including social media pages. You can install this on your own server, but it is not necessary for most users.

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Social media is where a lot of us spend a lot time. Sometimes minutes, but more likely hours, a day. Whether your platform of choice is Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, much of our daily life seems to be spent checking out what others are doing.

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According to a 2014 survey by the United States Office of Minority Health, only 9.4% of non-Hispanic black adults received mental health treatment or counseling, compared to 18.8% of non-Hispanic white adults.

Clemons explained that one of the many reasons there is a stigma around mental health in the black community is that if someone can not deal with issues in church then the thought is that you don't have enough faith or you are not giving it over to the church enough.

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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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The Facebook Cambridge Analytica revelations changed the way people in the US think about online privacy. And it should come as no surprise that many have grown wary over the mishandling of personal information.

Nearly a year later, a majority of US internet users said that Facebook sharing data with Cambridge Analytica raised some level of concern over how their information is used online, per survey findings from text message marketing company SlickText.

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'What happens when you have 100 prizes to offer, and just about 10 contenders?'