Hit the magic button!
Many sites now provide ‘feeds’ of their content which readers can subscribe to. This simple technology allows you to use software called a ‘feed reader’ or ‘aggregator’ to read content from sites instead of visiting the site itself. Don’t be put off by the acronyms like XML or RSS - this is genuinely easy to do. Websites that use RSS often show an orange button on their site or the icon appears in the website
address bar on a users web browser to let readers know that there is a feed available to receive updated content from that site automatically.
Social media can also be mixed together as ‘mashups’ incorporating more than one form of media using a mixture of RSS feeds. Pageflakes and other services help to manage feeds from various sources all in one place and enable the user to display them with a public webpage.
You can find out more about RSS on the ‘What is RSS‘ page on this site.
Examples in the wild:
- Dave Briggs set up a Pageflakes page to pull all the RSS feeds, from blogs, flickr, twitter and more for the recent UK Gov Barcamp event. Dave created a simple screencast to show readers how to set up and create their own pageflakes. Read his article and see his screencast…
In this guide:
- What is Social Media?
- What can it be used for?
- What makes if different from traditional media?
- The main types of social media
- How to keep people up to date
- How to get it right for your groups needs
- Inclusion for all and accessibility
- How was it for you - monitoring and evaluation
- Where to get help
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