Weekly Updates - August 17, 2019: Tumblr, YouTube, Back to School

This week students started heading back to school, with Chromebooks, laptops and all their other electronic devices in hand. There are plenty of updates to help them along. Plus news for YouTubers, bloggers, webmasters and much more.

Social blogging platform Tumblr is finding a new home with Automattic, the owner of WordPress. Yahoo originally bought Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion (with a b). Verizon purchased Yahoo in 2017, acquiring Tumblr and other assets like Flickr. Verizon didn’t seem to know what to do with Tumblr, beyond implementing a controversial and not-particularly-successful ban on porn and adult content. The sale price was reportedly for less than $3 million, a tiny fraction of Tumblr’s original (likely inflated) value.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg told The Verge he appreciates Tumblr’s unique and devoted community, and sees it as an opportunity to bring back some of the feel of old-school blogging, with a solid mobile app and social features. “The people who love Tumblr use it every day. They have more daily active users than WordPress.com has monthly active users. They’ve really cracked a lot of the social side of it.”
YouTube’s updated copyright policy no longer allows claimants to monetize videos with just very short or unintended music clips. This does not mean that a stray radio playing in the background won’t be a problem; copyright holders can still choose to block videos using their music without a license, and the new policy does not apply to videos claimed through the automated Content ID system. But this removes an incentive for copyright holders to claim videos that unintentionally use their music just for the money.
Discord has launched an internal live streaming service, that lets users broadcast their gameplay over a voice chat channel on your server. Up to ten people can watch. This is not so much a replacement for Twitch or YouTube live streaming, and more like hanging out with your friends and playing a game.
Google’s Area 120 is testing a service called Fundo, a "an audience engagement and monetization platform for YouTube creators" that lets them offer online meet-and-greets and photobooth sessions. Area 120 is Google’s workshop for experimental products, which may (or may not) eventually be launched to the public. If you are a creator who is interested in trying Fundo you can request an invitation.
Meanwhile, over on Patreon, creators with Pro and Premium accounts can link to Vimeo to share patron-only videos. “Unlisted Youtube links can easily be shared, so they aren’t secure. With the Vimeo integration, you can put out unreleased, raw, and new content and know it can’t be shared or leaked elsewhere.” YouTube does let Partners with Memberships enabled share members-only videos on the YouTube Community tab, but that option is not available for YouTube videos embedded on other sites.
You can now opt-in to experimental features in Google Play Books, including Custom Shelves (a feature I’ve been wanting forever), new searching and sorting options, and a “Ready to Read” shelf with the books you haven’t finished yet.
Are you a webmaster with questions for Google? The #AskGoogleWebmasters video series is for you. Google has also posted a post mortem of Search indexing problems they have had - and resolved - over the past few months.
Chromebooks are getting better audio controls, new camera features, and better notification management. As a Chromebook user those sound useful (although I’m not sure when I’ve actually used my Chromebook camera beyond video streaming and chatting).
There are new fonts in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides designed to improve your reading speed.
It’s back to school and Google had several updates for teachers and students this week: Google Assignments is a new tool for collecting and grading student work, including originality reports that scan the web for similar content; Socratic, a mobile learning app that uses AI to help high school and university students to find reference material and explanations of underlying concepts; and new search features for US high school school students researching colleges
If you have a device running at least Android 7, you can now sign in to some Google account pages by unlocking your phone’s screen lock, rather than entering a password. Google considers this “a step on our journey to making authentication safer and easier for everyone to use”.
Facebook is making Group settings easier to understand. Now Groups can be Public, Private and Visible, or Private and Hidden. They have also shared more details about how they enforce policy in Private groups, including using AI and Machine Learning to detect bad content, giving a community strikes if moderators break the rules or approve posts from members who break the rules and by giving admins more tools to review their community’s content.
Personal stories worth reading: Luke Kurtis about the nightmare of being locked out of his Apple account, which is a cautionary story of being locked into a single ecosystem (losing your Google account could be similarly bad); and the series of opinion pieces in the New York Times about how organised online harassment campaigns like GamerGate helped create the playbook for today’s political disinformation campaigns.
Weekend entertainment: Summer Sonic 2019 in Tokyo live stream
Have you checked out my playlist of the videos I suggest in my weekly roundup link list? Add the playlist to your YouTube account by clicking the save playlist link.

Read on for more news, updates and tips for YouTubers, advertisers, writers and more. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader. Miss last week’s update? Get it here.

Image: Apple on Books from @pixabay on Pexels (Free to use)

Made by Google, Android, Google Fi

Productivity

How a love of reading turned into new features for Play Books (Google)
New fonts intended to help improve reading speed now available in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides (G Suite Updates)
EDU in 90: Chrome Extensions to Save Time (G Suite)
Use the collaborative tools of G Suite alongside your LMS with the Assignments Beta (G Suite Updates)
Originality reports for Google Classroom and Google Assignments launching to beta (G Suite Updates)
Microsoft cuts Office 2019 one-time licenses through Home Use Program (Ars Technica)

Chromebooks

What’s new in Chrome OS: better audio, camera and notifications (Google)
Virtual desktops finally come to Chrome OS (The Verge)
Chrome OS 76 Stable version arrives: Here’s what you need to know (About Chromebooks)

Privacy and Security

Facebook contractors listened to audio conversations in Messenger (Daily Dot)
Microsoft’s new privacy policy admits humans are listening to some Skype and Cortana recordings (The Verge)
Google, Mozilla: We're changing what you see in Chrome, Firefox address bars (ZD Net)
Making authentication even easier with FIDO2-based local user verification for Google Accounts (Google Security)
New Research: Lessons from Password Checkup in action (Google Security)

More around the web

When the Internet Chases You From Your Home: How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War (pieces by Sarah Jeong, Charlie Warzel, Brianna Wu, Joan Donovan @New York Times Opinion)
Apple locked me out of its walled garden. It was a nightmare (Quartz)
Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees (The Verge)
Scooter start-up promised to serve a whole city. Then it cut out two poor areas (LA Times)
Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech (WIRED)

Comments

Sheila HensleyAugust 19, 2019 at 4:38 PM
Another packed publication, Peggy. I don't know how you do it but I hope you never stop. My favorite place to scan the best and latest news. Thank you !!

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