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…
Hello. We hope you’ve all had a great week so far. Google’s August 2023 core update ran for a total of 16 days, officially finishing up yesterday at 4:03 PM EDT. It was the longest-running core update of 2023. Updates in April, March, and February ran for 13 days, 13 days, and 14 days. The…
Howdy, folks. We’d like to ask you to cut us some slack today. We didn’t have much time to read through industry news this week because our whole team has been at Burning Man since Sunday. Pfft. Yeah right. None of us took any days off this week. We’ve all been busy. You have no…
Hello there. Is everyone feeling all right? We’re asking because yesterday was the “sickest day of the year” in the United States. That’s according to a five-year study that Flamingo just finished up. Flamingo is a software company (that we’d never heard of before yesterday) whose primary product helps businesses manage employee time off. Their…
Howdy, everyone. Today’s newsletter is off to an unbelievably late start. Better late than never. It could be worse. At least we didn’t get swept up in the excitement over the fake, room-temperature superconductor levitation stories. A bunch of people did. We were too busy going down the competitive Scrabble rabbit hole. It was much…
Hey, buddies. Stock up while you can if you’re a fan of incandescent light bulbs. If you’re in the United States, that is (most of Europe phased them out forever ago and will be banning fluorescent lights next month). Following a trend that began in 2007, the latest round of efficiency rules bans stores from…
Hey folks. We hope you’ve all had a great week so far. If you’re looking for an excuse to indulge yourself, you’ll be happy to learn that today is National Milk Chocolate Day. Elon Musk’s decades-long obsession with the letter X bled into his Twitter acquisition this week, so we’d like to begin today’s newsletter…
Good afternoon. Our plan was to begin today’s newsletter with some information about WooCommerce merchants gaining the ability to sell things to TikTok users directly through the app. It’s a big deal and we’ll give you a rundown shortly, but we ran into something interesting while researching the details of the new partnership. We saw…
Hey buddies. We’ve been super busy this week, but we’re in a good mood because of the great Prime Day deal we got on a portable air conditioner. You wear it around your neck and it has a thermostat you can control with a mobile app. We flew to Florida in June because we had…
