Greetings, y’all. It’s been a tumultuous week for the internet. Between Microsoft quiet-quitting on the world economy and a data breach that contains close to 100% of AT&T’s 21st century customers (and the people those customers called, emailed, and texted), the fact that Disney got hacked by a group of militant, anti-AI furries is barely even making headlines. What a time to be alive.
The Disney thing was the result of many intersecting, convoluted motivations, but the catalyst was Club Penguin’s multiplayer servers shutting down. The Microsoft snafu was much more consequential (for non-Club Penguin players, that is). It grounded flights, knocked television stations offline, took down 911 calls in entire states, and disrupted all kinds of physical infrastructure. Local Viking customers were spared from such inconveniences because AWS never fails.
We came up with a new gallery feature during our unblemished uptime: image tagging. To make use of it, head to the Local Viking or Local Brand Manager Gallery (your browser must be logged into your account for either link to work), click the checkbox in the bottom-left corner of any picture, then click on the Tags drop-down menu that appears. You can create new tags by typing them in as needed or use the checkboxes to select existing tags. Images can be tagged more than once. Nifty, right? Make sure you click the blue Save button you can see in the recording above this paragraph when you’re finished
Next up, a news organization called Proof (proofnews.org) built a tool that allows you to find out if your YouTube videos were s̶t̶o̶l̶e̶n̶ used to train generative AI. Just head to this page, scroll down until you see the search bar, type in the name of a YouTube channel, and wait for the results. None of the videos from our YouTube channel were used, but that doesn’t mean yours weren’t. Videos with user-submitted subtitle tracks are most likely to show up in the results.
The best thing we read this week is in the Merchynt newsletter. It explains what to do if your business (or a business belonging to a client) falls prey to the nasty tactic of malicious Google Maps edits. Those can be real rankings-wreckers. Our next closing link comes from The Atlantic: A New Development in the Debate About Instagram and Teens. Meta, a corporation that is undeniably aware of the demolition work its products do to adolescent female self-esteem, usually blocks researchers from looking into such things. It’s now flirting with transparency. Third, from Hootsuite, 35 Must-Know Instagram Statistics for Marketers in 2024. Last, and probably most practically, we’ve got Power Words: 150+ Words to Drive More Clicks and Conversions on Social Media. It’s a Buffer article that gives you a list of the most effective words and terms to use in social media posts and picture captions.
Have a great weekend, everybody. We’ll see you again next Friday.