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Do actually add cinnamon to my curries thinking about it, maybe that will offset the Naan bread 

One of the busiest times of year in the marketing calendar is obviously Christmas, and November normally sees all the big brands showcasing their efforts.

Paypal seems to have kicked up a storm of protest from its customers according to the Daily Mail, by suggesting Santa doesn't exist! 

Source Daily Mail

It seems critics have been very vocal across social media and asked the ASA to pull the advert. There's no public response yet from Paypal, but I'll suspect it's not how they imagined their new campaign would pan out 

Maybe not the most shrewd of marketing strategies? What do you think? Poor planning or storm in a tea cup?

What kind of healthy meal suggestions would you have that included Cinnamon? Isn't it normally associated in more sweet type foods?

Well if that turned up outside my house with an English speaking delivery person, I would be impressed 

A worthy thread bump

Some people have too much time on their hands! Very clever though

Now it's got to be said, I do have a bit of a weakness for Dominos, obviously other Pizza brands are available 

But instead of getting delivered in the Citroen Saxo with lots of Halfords accessories on it, or the aging Fiesta with new alloys an driven by a pimply youth, how about this!

Somehow I doubt it will make it to our shores, or by the time it does, I will still be on my wife enforced pizza ban and health quest

Augmented reality, it's pretty amazing isn't it?

Augmented reality has seemed to go a little quiet after making big headlines a few years ago, with promises to change our world. There are some great apps for your phone, but the novelty seemed to wear off.

These guys are interesting, they secured $500k start up capital and are recruiting creative talent and coders like mad, yet aren't really saying much, and their last blog entry was in Feb this year.

No doubt they will be hoovered up by Google. It looks like they have developed a better system to create these effects, and no doubt we will soon start to hear more about them.

This demo video is pretty good, and shows an idea of where they are going. The user wears a headset, then via augmented reality you can super impose images, video, and play games. One of the best comments I saw was from a 70 year old man who asked if he could super impose a younger woman over his wife 

Bloomberg broke the news yesterday about Googles new "RankBrain" algorithm which is now (and has been for a little while) live in the search results.

The article is a bit of hype which will no doubt fuel the Skynet comparison from the 1980's Terminator films, but behind the hype it's quite an interesting development and something that shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

Rankbrain itself is a machine learning algorithm that starts the journey of artificial intelligence. Not quite self thinking robots, but an algorithm that can start to understand context in web pages and peoples search queries.

Search Engine Land have highlighted part of the Bloomberg article, a quote from senior research scientist Greg Corrado: "In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query".

What does it mean for small business websites?

It could mean quite a lot. We know the famous Google algorithm has reportedly hundreds of signals that decide if your web page about widgets should end up on page 1 or page 55, but this particular signal is the third most powerful. So it's worth paying attention.

How does RankBrain work?

Forgetting scifi and sticking with our humble web pages, you may be aware of something called semantic search or structured data. I've banged on about it quite a lot over the years, but it now looks like it has become more important. I suspect this is the key driver for RankBrain. I'm not Google, and Google aren't being very open about how it works, but with all the drive towards more ordered data, knowledge graphs, carousal results, I suspect this hinges around structured data.

Structured Data is a means to mark up areas of your web page and site to tell the like of Google what your page is about, and provide some all important context. I did a post explaining all about structured data a while ago which covers the basics:

Semantic Search Marketing & Structured Data what is it?

A Simplified example and demonstration

In a nut shell, taking something simple, such as our address on the bottom of this page. You can see it in the footer as:

Well Google actually see's it as structured data, or "mark up", with each address line marked up to explain what it is and how it fits in to bigger picture.

itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness"© 2005-2015 Lowi Ltd T/A (this tells Google we are a business and what our name is)

itemprop="url" a href="http://www.mylocalservices.co.uk" (this tells Google our web address)

itemprop="name"My Local Services (the name we are known as)

itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress" (this then tells Google that the following information is the postal address information of that business)

itemprop="streetAddress"Minerva Mill,

itemprop="addressLocality"Alcester

itemprop="addressRegion"Warwickshire,

itemprop="postalCode"B49 5ET,

itemprop="telephone"01789 761 364 (finally, Google now knows and understands our telephone number)

Losing you? Here is a visual representation.

Without any structured data for Google to read, how would it know our telephone number? Now to be fair Google has been getting smarter and smarter at extracting information from our web sites to answer users queries, but structured data makes it a 100% easier. We have told Google we are a company, who we are, our trading name, where we are and our phone number.

If I type in Google:

what is the telephone number of my local services

This is the response:

Now that was done "incognito" mode, or not logged in, so we didn't have any biased results, but for the search term My Local Services, Google knows exactly what our telephone number is, displaying it in a dedicated box at the top, as well as populating the knowledge panel on the right hand side with our building location and map listing. Remember this is for our generic trading name, not our actual legal business name, which you would expect to rank for.

Now that's just a very high level example, and the structured data tags shown above have been simplified with the correct html removed, to make them clearer (before anyone says typo!)

How could you use it?

Look a the possibilities. The way we search has changed, users expectations have grown over the years and the search queries they type in reflect that.

Imagine adding all sorts of structured data to your web pages, directly explaining to Google what your content is about, so it can show your web pages (or content) to users queries. A recent study suggested only 20% of web sites were utilising structured data. Google has been banging on about it for years, with easy mark up tools in your Web Master Tools, but few people have been really listening. This makes this area of search, which has become so much harder over recent years more accessible to people who are looking to push the boundaries.

I suspect with the RankBrain algorithm which will be no doubt hoovering up as much structured data as it can, will start to change things.

This post only scratches the surface of the possibilities. If you want to know more, one of the best places to learn, is a Google Group called Semantic Search Marketing. 

If you want to learn about the correct way to implement structured data tags, then head over to schema.org a collaborative community with engineers from the likes of Google and Yahoo.

Article sources: Bloomeberg, Search Engine Land

So what are your thoughts? Does it all make sense, or does it sound like a load of complicated gibberish? Have you spotted an opportunity for your own website, or are you already utilising structured data?

If anyone has any questions I'll try and answer as best as I can, but I'm learning as we go along as well 

Spotted this on my Facebook feed, and it turns out to be a really old article, 2007 vintage. First time I've seen it but did make me laugh and certainly resonated, and it's just the sort of answer that my missus would fire back, especially if I asked that fatal question... what have you been doing today? 

Article from the Washington Post, 2007, by By Carolyn Hax

Question: 

Best friend has child. Her: exhausted, busy, no time for self, no time for me, etc. Me (no kids): Wow. Sorry. What'd you do today? Her: Park, play group . . .

Okay. I've done Internet searches, I've talked to parents. I don't get it. What do stay-at-home moms do all day? Please no lists of library, grocery store, dry cleaners . . . I do all those things, too, and I don't do them EVERY DAY. I guess what I'm asking is: What is a typical day and why don't moms have time for a call or e-mail? I work and am away from home nine hours a day (plus a few late work events) and I manage to get it all done. I'm feeling like the kid is an excuse to relax and enjoy -- not a bad thing at all -- but if so, why won't my friend tell me the truth? Is this a peeing contest ("My life is so much harder than yours")? What's the deal? I've got friends with and without kids and all us child-free folks get the same story and have the same questions.

Answer:

Relax and enjoy. You're funny.

Or you're lying about having friends with kids.

Or you're taking them at their word that they actually have kids, because you haven't personally been in the same room with them.

Internet searches?

I keep wavering between giving you a straight answer and giving my forehead some keyboard. To claim you want to understand, while in the same breath implying that the only logical conclusions are that your mom-friends are either lying or competing with you, is disingenuous indeed.

So, since it's validation you seem to want, the real answer is what you get. In list form. When you have young kids, your typical day is: constant attention, from getting them out of bed, fed, clean, dressed; to keeping them out of harm's way; to answering their coos, cries, questions; to having two arms and carrying one kid, one set of car keys, and supplies for even the quickest trips, including the latest-to-be-declared-essential piece of molded plastic gear; to keeping them from unshelving books at the library; to enforcing rest times; to staying one step ahead of them lest they get too hungry, tired or bored, any one of which produces the kind of checkout-line screaming that gets the checkout line shaking its head.

It's needing 45 minutes to do what takes others 15.

It's constant vigilance, constant touch, constant use of your voice, constant relegation of your needs to the second tier.

It's constant scrutiny and second-guessing from family and friends, well-meaning and otherwise. It's resisting constant temptation to seek short-term relief at everyone's long-term expense.

It's doing all this while concurrently teaching virtually everything -- language, manners, safety, resourcefulness, discipline, curiosity, creativity. Empathy. Everything.

It's also a choice, yes. And a joy. But if you spent all day, every day, with this brand of joy, and then, when you got your first 10 minutes to yourself, wanted to be alone with your thoughts instead of calling a good friend, a good friend wouldn't judge you, complain about you to mutual friends, or marvel how much more productively she uses her time. Either make a sincere effort to understand or keep your snit to yourself.

It does sound very familiar, needing 45 minutes (or more!) to do something that takes 15   Michael MacIntyre does some great sketches about having kids as well. Explaining the mechanics of leaving the house, without kids, you put your shoes on, open the door and walk through. With kids its a military operation, with one kid taking clothes off while you are trying to put a coat on the other  

I reckon stay at home parents should be entitled to some kind of award, or maybe a state benefit of an all expenses cruise round the world when the kids leave home