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Tools We Love: Regex101.com

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The tool that we love that we’ll be highlighting today is Regex101.com, which can help you build and test regular expressions.

Regular expressions were one of the hardest things to get my head around when I first encountered them.  They appeared alien (still do sometimes), and applying them to a real-world situation at the time was difficult. I tried to “get” regular expressions for a long time with many failed attempts.

While I still don’t have the language anywhere near mastered, and wouldn’t even joke about being an expert in it, using the Regex101.com really helped me get over a lot of hurdles using the language for my day-to-day work.

While this post won’t teach you regular expressions, it will give you some tips on using Regex101.com to learn and build functioning expressions.

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How Will Blockchain Affect Digital Marketing?

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With the advent of cryptocurrencies such as the famous Bitcoin (I’m still waiting to recoup my losses), Etherium (I’m still waiting to recoup my losses), Litecoin (I’m still waiting to recoup my losses), and hundreds more, the general public has been made aware of a far more interesting (in my humble opinion) invention: blockchain. How will this new technology affect the internet and for the purposes of this blog post, the work of digital marketers?

What is Blockchain?

A relatively new concept developed in 2008, blockchain is the reason cryptocurrencies are able to exist. This technology is essentially a digital ledger of economic transactions, where everyone part of a transaction has an immutable record, rather than through a centralized platform. Basically, blockchain is a fancy, incorruptible Google Sheet with its sharing settings set to public.

This technology makes it almost impossible to falsify data, while also creating a permanent record from start to finish. Cryptocurrencies are just the beginning, blockchain can also be used to record virtually anything of value, not just money, which calls for endless possibilities across various industries. This includes healthcare, banking, internet privacy, manufacturing and can even change the way we vote. So how does this new technology relate to digital marketing and how will it affect the way marketers do their jobs in the future?

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Diving Into Entity Search Results

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Recently I was inspired by Mike’s post, ‘Leveraging Machine-Readable Entity ID’s for SEO’, which if you haven’t checked out already you definitely should. Mike’s post shines a light on MREID’s (described as a canonical URI for an entity, issued and used by Google) and how we can look to using them for SEO. To quote Mike’s post:

A machine-readable entity ID is, in essence, a string of characters used to exclusively refer to a single entity.

According to Bill Slawski — and thanks to his tireless work analyzing Google Patents, plus, generally paying more attention than anyone else — we know that Google is using MREID across many services like Google Trends, Google Lens, and Google Reverse Image Search (to keep track of entities within images).

Once I understood what machine-readable entity IDs were (here’s an example of the one for Seattle: /m/0d9jr), I had to know more.

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