Two Topic Tuesday – The Feed & “Like Farming”

Written by TMG on January 21, 2014. Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

First of all – welcome to Two Topic Tuesday, where we take a short look at two news topics related to social media, marketing, design or search engines.

Today, we’ll take a look at The Feed and “Like Farming.”

The Feed

Mashable posted this article about The Feed’s influence on our ability to consume information. They make a good point about the evolution of the internet and the presentation thereof, as well as providing a visual tour through The Feed’s timeline. RSS feeds, as they were once known, display customized content for the web user – organizing the Internet into an easy-to-swallow entity, as opposed to a cluster of overwhelming information.

Personally, I think we have a way to go. It’s easy to cluster feeds, which to some extent comes down to the user. With so many Twitter accounts and Facebook pages to follow, it’s hard to narrow down our lists. So, we follow everyone we can and our feeds get a bit cramped. Is that our fault our the developers’? I don’t know. Whatever the case, the very idea of a Feed has turned the internet into a much more palatable source of information, even if the information isn’t necessarily trustworthy…

“Like Farming”

Check out this article from CNN and you’ll see why we need to constantly remind ourselves of the fallibility of the web. You might even remember the Churchill meme from this past Friday’s post, but CNN’s example of a young girl, whose fight with cancer was used to get publicity for someone else’s Facebook account is, in the girl’s mother’s words, “gut wrenching.”

I don’t know how or if this sort of thing can be prevented. Free speech allows people to present false and immoral ideas and the internet has seen this to an unparalleled degree. Sadly, not everyone who posts under false pretenses gets called out by a major news outlet.

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What are your thoughts on these topics? Can The Feed be improved? How? Is it immoral to farm for likes with emotional images that you don’t own? Could you imagine ways to prevent this sort of fraud?

Let us know in the comments!

Tags: News, Social Media