Greetings, everybody. We’re going to start this week’s newsletter with a rumor. GPT-4 might be coming out next week. That’s according to Dr. Andreas Braun, the CTO of Microsoft Germany (someone who would know). He casually mentioned it during a presentation yesterday. To put this in context, ChatGPT is based on GPT-3, released in June…
Greetings, folks. We need to begin today’s email with an apology. We’ve been plugging AMAs with our CTO, Nate Fischer, pretty hard over the past few months. The one that was scheduled for two days ago didn’t happen. We didn’t show. It’s not Nate’s fault. You can blame this fiasco squarely on the newsletter staff…
Greetings, everybody. We realize we’ve spent the past few weeks hyping up Bing Search. We would’ve bet against ourselves doing that as recently as two months ago. What a time to be alive. Anyway, we definitely have an interesting detail to add about Microsoft’s renewed incursion into online search, but we’ve got some Google Maps…
Greetings, folks. We’re sorry that last week’s newsletter reached you so late in the day. We had to wait on someone from Mailchimp’s only-available-via-email support staff to reinstate our account after it got suspended by an automated algorithm. We’d love to explain what happened, but that could actually trigger the same outcome. We’ll just say…
Greetings, everybody. Today’s newsletter is long and has a greater level of detail than we usually give you. This week’s news kinda demands that. Microsoft made search interesting for the first time in 20 years a few days ago. We’ll get into that as soon as we remind you about our ongoing AMA series and…
Greetings, newsletter readers. Can we all just take a moment to agree that inflation sucks? Our modest handbasket of groceries rang up to $100.43 at Safeway the other day. It got us thinking. Uber costs more than cabs in 2023. AirBNBs are more than hotels. Streaming video services are more expensive than cable. How did…
Greetings, readers. We have an announcement to start today’s newsletter. Our CTO, Nate, will be hosting another AMA session on Wednesday. You can register for it here. Participants are welcome to ask about local SEO, marketing, our GeoBooster mobile app– you can ask about anything, really. It’s up to you. This will be the fourth…
Hey there, everyone. The US State Department recently decreed that it will fully adopt Calibri as its standard font by February 6. To give you a quick history lesson, Calibri was the default font in Word 2007. Times New Roman, the font the State Department currently uses, was the default font in Word 2003. At…
Howdy, folks. This week’s newsletter is a bit late because we moved from the US east coast to the US west coast on Tuesday. While time zones are a straightforward construct that can be fully grasped by ten-year-olds who understand the earth’s shape and the concept of rotation, we still managed to let them stymie…
What a year. Many of us who grew up hearing about five-cent Coca-Cola bottles and $5,000 houses from our parents and grandparents are experiencing inflation for the first time. It kinda sucks. Overall though, our conclusion is that 2022 went pretty well. Sure, bad things happened. Millions of people in Ukraine might disagree with…
Greetings, readers. We’d like to wish all Local Viking and Local Brand Manager users a Merry Christmas this weekend, a Happy ongoing Hannukah, or a fantastic more-obscure holiday. As it turns out, we have a bunch of presents for everyone this week. There are many meaningful updates to let everyone know about. Nate described most…
Greetings, everyone. Congratulations if your team/country/whatever won the World Cup. It’s over, right? It was impossible to do anything online without running into a billion Qatari construction horror stories for a while there, and we haven’t seen any of those in at least a week. We aren’t big soccer people at Local Viking, but we…
Greetings, all. We’re starting a new routine. You’ll be able to find this newsletter on the Local Viking blog from now on. In theory, at least. Although our record-keeping practices put Swiss tax auditors to shame (definitely not a joke), we’re having trouble locating the login credentials that would allow us to update said blog….
Let’s participate in a role-playing exercise. Pretend you work at an agency. One of your satisfied clients just called. Her best friend just started a personal injury law firm. Good news: thanks to your impeccable track record and a persuasive referral, a client just effortlessly landed in your lap, sight unseen. Way to go. Here’s…
Hey there, Vikings. Many of you know about our just-launched reputation management business, RepCo. If you don’t, well, go take a look. The home page is rep.co. If reputation management is something you’re unfamiliar with, keep your eyes peeled for our nearly-ready ebook. Today’s blog post will be an excerpt from that book. Without further…
This blog post will cover the preparations that are necessary when your client opens a new office or location. It’s not a long audit. There are only two important steps. If there’s any bad news, it’s that you may need to have an awkward talk with your client. The good news will outweigh that though…
Google Images allows people to visually locate websites for all kinds of tasks. People are able to find recipes, DIY instructions, beauty tips, interior design pointers, and many other things by searching for them on Google Images. The pictures that users are shown can give people a direct peek at what they’re looking for, sometimes…
Google sums up page experience by saying it’s “making sure that people using our websites, web pages, and web apps are getting the best experience that we’re able to give them.” Keeping that in mind, the individual metrics that make up page experience will be reviewed and potentially updated every year. There are two broad…
Hey, Vikings. Checking in. We made significant progress this week, and a lot of our users are now established with their private instances. There are still some users who’ve got some hurdles to clear before they’re in the same boat, so we’re going to go over some recurring pitfalls we’ve seen people encounter and what…
Hey there, Vikings. We wanted to take a moment to let everyone know how things are going with private instances. The quick summary is that our users currently fall into three camps. We have many who are already up and running on their private instances. Others have encountered bureaucratic or technical obstacles, and are therefore…
