Peggy K's Creator News

This week Google announced a number of new AI-powered updates for G Suite, which will hopefully eventually trickle down to us consumer users. Plus Chrome started marking “Not Secure” sites, YouTube is testing a new “Explore” feature and tech companies released their second quarter earnings reports (good for Alphabet, not good for Facebook & Twitter). This week was Google Cloud Next ‘18 (https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ ), the annual Google conference focused on Google Cloud and G Suite offerings for enterprise customers. Announcements (coming soon!) include AI-powered features like smart reply in Hangouts Chat, smart compose in Gmail, grammar suggestions in Google Docs, and voice commands in Hangouts Meet hardware. Google is also bringing an enterprise version of Google Voice to G Suite , with its own AI features to “facilitate voicemail transcription and spam filtering”. See the links below for details about all the announcements for G Suite, Google Cloud Platform and mor...

This week YouTube focused on Creators, the blobs are back and both Google and Facebook had a bad week. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki posted a mid-year update (and video !) on how YouTube is progressing on the five priorities for creators announced at the beginning of the year . Those priorities are better transparency and communication, better support creator success (i.e. make money), more options for viewer engagement, tightening and enforcing policies, and investing more in learning and education. If you’ve been following my YouTube updates, there wasn’t much new, except the announcement of a brand new initiative called “YouTube Learning” that will provide grants and promotion in support of educational content. No details as yet, but that sounds promising.  Sometimes YouTube makes nice changes with no fanfare For example, now #hashtags from the video description are now visible above the video title. Before you go hashtag crazy, keep in mind that YouTube does have a number of...

Man, it's a hot one. Like seven inches from the midday sun . Hope you’re staying cool! This week there’s copyright tools for creators, YouTube and Facebook initiatives to fight the spread of misinformation, announcements from Google Marketing Live 2018 and more. YouTube is trying to help creators protect their content. The new Copyright Match tool allows creators to find their videos that have been uploaded to other channels, and then contact the uploader or ask YouTube to take down the video. This isn’t quite the same as Content ID - it only finds full matches, not clips or audio alone, and there is no option to monetize the detected video. It’s currently rolling out to channels with at least 100,000 subscribers, and YouTube hopes to eventually provide this tool to all channels in the YouTube Partner Program. YouTube also now has a special troubleshooter for help with copyright issues. It’s definitely makes it easier to find the information you need rather than navigating t...

The themes this week were privacy and policy. With the US Independence Day holiday in the middle of the week, it’s not too surprising that there weren’t many updates from Google and other US companies. But what we do have are some news and discussions of content removal stats, potential privacy issues, and an update on the EU copyright policy reform proposal.  Google’s Transparency Report for the first quarter of 2018, with stats for videos removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Most videos were removed by automated systems. And it turns out the vast majority of human-flagged content was actually not removed, and individual Trusted Flaggers were responsible for most of the successful removals. YouTube also made it easier to moderate comments on your videos and channel. Instead of having to choose between holding all comments for review, or allowing all comments, you can now have YouTube hold potentially inappropriate comments for review. YouTube says that the...