Share your Expertise
- If you blog about Food & Drink, Beauty, Fitness, Home & Garden or Video Games, there is a new opportunity for you: Google Cameos. Cameos are short videos that answer frequently asked questions. They appear on knowledge cards and in Google Search.This looks like a way to build your personal brand while helping others with your knowledge. Currently this is only an option for US bloggers. (Not sure what this is? Search for quesadillas, then look for the “top questions answered” section.)
- Google Maps is expanding Local Guides profiles. If your profile is public, people will be able to follow you for updates and recommendations. Google is also adding a new restricted profile option, that lets you approve new followers before they can see the photos, reviews and lists on your profile.
YouTube
- YouTube announced they are discontinuing Community Contributions as of September 28. If a channel has Community Contributions enabled, anyone can submit closed captions and translated subtitles for the channel’s videos. Those are held for moderation. YouTube says there is very little use of this feature, and it’s sometimes used for spam and abuse. Note that captions are NOT going away. Channel owners can still manually add captions in addition to YouTube’s automated captions.
- If your channel is on your main Google account, you can now add an Editor without giving them access to your revenue data. Learn more about adding managers and editors in YouTube Studio.
- The YouTube Studio mobile app now has dark mode. The app lets you easily manage channel comments, see your channel analytics and more.
- YouTube is testing a new look and position for the upload icon in the Android app.
- YouTube is also testing a filter for “top comments” in YouTube Studio.
- If you are interested in live streaming, Creator Insider talks to a YouTube Live product manager about “The Future of LIVE streaming”.
Productivity
- Google One now offers easy phone backup and a Google account storage manager tool for everyone, whether you have a paid plan or not. It has useful features like pinpointing large emails in Gmail and large files in Google Drive, and you can easily claim storage space by permanently removing deleted emails.
- Adobe has launched free Adobe Acrobat tools on the web, with easy shortcuts. Go to PDF.new to convert a Microsoft Office or image file to a PDF, Sign.new to fill and sign a PDF form, JPGtoPDF.new to quickly convert a JPG image file to a PDF or use CompressPDF.new to create a smaller file. Or just open the Adobe Acrobat homepage. With a free Adobe account you can create or compress one PDF for free every day.
- If you use Adobe Spark, open create.new to create a new social media image. If you use Canva, design.new will create a new design.
Communication
- Google Meet has changed the way meeting permissions work for Google Calendar Events set up by someone else or transferred to your Google Calendar. This isn’t likely to affect you unless you have someone setting up Events and Meetings on your behalf, or you use shared Calendars.
- The Google Chat iOS and Android apps now have dark mode. Google Chat is the successor to Hangouts, but currently is only available to G Suite users, or people invited to a Chat Room by a G Suite user.
- Discord is trying to make it easier to build communities, by allowing you to designate your server as a Community Server. Community Servers can have a welcome screen, announcement channel, server stats and insights, and the ability to be listed on the Discord Discover tab.
- Telegram got a number of new features including Profile Videos, improved People Nearby, unlimited file sharing with up to 2 Gigabytes per file, mini-thumbnails in your chat list and notifications, group stats, and more.
Webmasters and Publishers
- Funding Choices is Google’s Consent Management Platform. It allows AdMob and Google Ad Manager publishers to gather and manage consent for the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and opt-out requests for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Funding Choices is now better integrated with AdMob and Ad Manager, and has new features that allow publishers to communicate with users for GDPR and CCPA purposes. This is not available for AdSense publishers. Learn more on the Funding Choices website.
- Google is trying to provide greater transparency around ads. They will be introducing a new “about this ad” feature that lets you see the verified name of the advertiser. If you don’t want to wait for months to see this, you can install the Ads Transparency Spotlight extension in Chrome.
- Google Search Console now supports Image License structured data. The Image License structured data will allow Google Image search results to show a “Licenseable” badge on images on websites with that markup. This is still in beta, but Google suggests you get your website ready.
- The new Bing Webmaster Tools is now fully released, with new and enhanced tools.
Just for fun
- There are now AR bugs in Google Search on mobile.
Music and musicians
- The Lollapalooza music festival is all online this year, and you can watch on YouTube this weekend. There are a mixture of live performances and recordings from previous years.
- August is Music Month on Twitch. They will be featuring musici with “six weeks of education about features, products, and best practices that will help those participating to set goals while leveling up their current broadcasts.”
- Facebook now has official music videos in the US, with a “Music” page that lets you explore videos by genre or theme.
That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get it here.
Image: Agate by annca on Pixabay. Free for commercial use.
Image: Agate by annca on Pixabay. Free for commercial use.
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