Hello, readers. We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Hell, we hope you had a wonderful 2023. Local Viking and Local Brand Manager users certainly did. We added a ton of bussin’ features and improvements this year, but the two things we put the most time and effort into are the keyword/location audits we released…
Merry Christmas, everyone. We’ll be at a large, multigenerational family gathering by the time you read this. The kind movie characters always dread. We’ve never been able to figure out why every Hollywood production portrays Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners as tense, confrontational powder kegs, but we can confidently state that our holiday experiences are always…
Hey, folks. There’s only one more newsletter between now and Christmas. Don’t wait until the last minute to get your shopping done unless your idea of fun is digging through Circle K’s remaining gift cards at 10 PM on Christmas Eve (like one of us did in 2022). It would be worse to do that…
Hey, everybody. We came across several interesting news items this week. Venezuela is dredging up 19th century treaties to justify the Florida-sized bite that it wants to take out of Guyana, its oil-rich next door neighbor. DeepMind, a Google subsidiary, announced Gemini, a family of multimodal models (the high end of which is more capable…
Good day, everyone. Did any of you take advantage of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals over the past week? We got a 92” tripod, a fancy aluminum razor, and the bougiest shaving accessories we could find (like a kit with a badger hair brush and obnoxiously expensive French shaving cream). We can’t foresee our first…
Greetings, everyone. Happy November. Please accept our apologies for being a day late. Call it vanity if you must, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to post the crap we had ready yesterday. We couldn’t think clearly at all and it was awful. Our best guess is that the Propofol we’d been administered on Wednesday and…
Hey, folks. While tons of newsworthy things are happening, especially in a New Jersey-sized country in the Middle East, the good news for us is that we barely needed to spend any time researching what to write about today because a major Google Maps update was announced yesterday. The reason that’s good news for us…
Hey folks. Well, last week’s newsletter didn’t stand the test of time. It was anchored to a Wired op-ed piece that accused Google of fabricating costly search terms to bilk its advertising customers out of their campaign budgets. After withstanding attacks and takedown requests from Google’s legal team that began as soon as the column…
Hello, everybody. If this were most weeks, we’d focus on a spam detection update that Google announced on Wednesday. This isn’t most weeks and there’s a bigger fish to fry, but it’s still pretty relevant. We’ll give you a rundown after we publicize a new Local Viking help article. We get a lot of questions…
Hello, everybody. We’re squeezed for time as usual and Google isn’t doing us any favors today. What we mean by that is a best-case scenario for writing this newsletter is a week when the Google Maps blog has a new post. We have no such luck right now. The most recent Maps post is over…
Hey folks. Microsoft pulled a pretty spectacular own goal a few days ago when it accidentally leaked gigabytes of documents that shed light on the way it makes several varieties of sausage. If you want to see outlines of the next Xbox console or communications between Microsoft executives who are plotting a hostile takeover of…
Hey folks. We finally got to take some news in yesterday after a few months of dealing with the madness that inevitably accompanies new software development. The unfortunate thing is we couldn’t have timed this worse. The first story we read was horrifying. An FDA panel just declared phenylephrine ineffective. It doesn’t matter if you…
