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Showing posts from September, 2018

Weekly Update - September 29, 2018: Search, Chrome, Hangouts

This week Google celebrated their 20th birthday with new search features, historical overviews, plus tips, tricks and Easter eggs. Plus there are updates for Chrome, Hangouts, Project Fi and much more. Google has noticed people sometimes search for information about a topic over the course of several days. To help you save and organize your searches, Google is using what it calls the “Topic Layer” to help understand what you are looking for. There are new Activity Cards that show pages you’ve already visited and previous searches you’ve done on a topic. You can add links from an Activity Card into a Collection, a way to keep track of groups of links. And Google will “intelligently show subtopics” related to your search.  A common reason to save and organize your searches over the course of a few days or weeks is when you are planning a vacation. Google is updating “Your Trips”, to make it easier to organize travel plans still in the works and resume planning where you last left of

Weekly Update - September 22, 2018: YouTube Gaming, Video Conferencing, Parental Controls

Happy autumn everyone! There are updates this week for gamers, parents, and businesses and more. The big news this week is that three years after its launch, the stand-alone YouTube Gaming will be retired, as gaming content and featurs features are integrated into YouTube proper. The new home for YouTube Gaming ( youtube.com/gaming ) with personalized content is live, as are new individual game pages. YouTube expects this will bring more viewers to gamers’ content. The stand-alone YouTube Gaming apps will be retired in March 2019.  You can now add third-party video conferencing to your Google Calendar events. You are no longer limited to Hangouts Classic or Hangouts Meet (for G Suite accounts). You can now link Webex, GoToMeeting, UberConference or Vonage to your account to set up a video call participants can join by clicking a link on their calendar. Up until this week parents could only manage the activity of their kids too young to create their own Google account. Now Google

Weekly Update - September 15, 2018: Copyright, YouTube Kids, Google+

While a lot of the tech chatter this week was about Apple’s iPhone event, Google announced updates to Google+, YouTube Kids, Hangouts Meet and more. And there was bad news for Inbox users and folks concerned about copyright laws. Read on... This week three controversial copyright-related proposals were approved by the European Parliament: Article 11, which requires “commercial platforms” to have a license to link to a news article; Article 12a, which prohibits posting your own photos or videos of sports matches; and Article 13, which requires large platforms to use copyright filters to examine everything uploaded for possible infringement. The details have not been fully worked out yet so the fight goes on .  Google+ has made it easier to share a file from your Google Drive account. All you need to do is click the Drive icon when creating a post to access all your Drive folders and files. This feature is only available for Google+ Profiles, not Google+ Pages.  If you have an En

Weekly Update - September 8, 2018: Chrome B-Day, Google+ Aspire, Blog Compass

This week we celebrate Chrome’s 10th birthday (and Google’s 20th), and there are updates for Bloggers, Plussers, YouTubers and more. The official Google+ Collections community is now the Google+ Aspire Community. It’s new focus is to provide resources to learn how to better use Google+ features (profiles, images, hashtags and more), and creating and curating great content. It’s also a place to get feedback on your posts from other Plussers. Kicking it off is discussion on how to create recipe posts. Be sure to join the community to participate (https://plus.google.com/communities/104797282868426074024), and if you have content you think should be highlighted, you can submit it.   Blog Compass by Google is a new Android app designed to help you manage your Blogger or Wordpress blog. You can get stats, moderate comments, and the app will suggest trending topic ideas for your next post. This beta version of the app is only available in India.  The new Google Search Console has gr

Weekly Update - September 1, 2018: YouTube Giving, Google India, Blogger

This week was full of positive updates, including tools for YouTube creators to raise money for charities, YouTube app updates to improve your digital wellbeing, making content and Google services more accessible in India, Google Assistant is bilingual and Google One is rolling out to more countries. Google announced the YouTube Giving initiative, which provides Creators with tools to support charitable giving to US non-profits. In addition to adding Donation Cards , YouTube Partners can now use Super Chat for Good for donations during their live streams and Premieres. And now select creators and non-profits can run Fundraisers with a Donate button on their channel, or team up with other channels for Community Fundraisers. Currently only Donation Cards and Super Chat for Good are broadly available to Creators. YouTube also posted desktop web release notes, with an overview of recent updates and bug fixes. Check it out on the YouTube Help Forum and give YouTube some positive feedb