Weekly Update - March 13, 2021: YouTube, Meet, Chromebooks

Just over a year ago the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic.It feels like we are finally slowly moving towards normal, or at least whatever the new normal will be. It’s likely many people will continue to work from home, and there will probably be ongoing travel limitations. But overall, I am hopeful things are getting better. On to news:

As YouTube announced last November, changes in the terms of service mean that all YouTube Partners must submit US tax information in AdSense. If you don’t submit tax information, a larger portion of your YouTube earnings may be withheld. This is a complicated update, so if this may affect you check out the link.

Google Meet is rolling out a number of new features. The best one? Tiled view in the mobile app. That’s available now for iOS and “coming soon” to Android. For education and business accounts, there’s a new option to schedule breakout rooms before a meeting in Google Calendar, and a new (paid) dial-in and dial-out options.

Google’s Chromebooks just turned 10! It seems like yesterday when I was using the CR-48 prototype, which was useful even without all the bells and whistles of modern Chromebooks. Google announced a number of new features, including screen capture tools, the new “Tote” holding space to help you find your files, improved copy-paste with the clipboard, the ability to directly control your Android phone and more.

New tutorial

• Upload video directly to your Blogger blog: you don’t need a YouTube channel to share video on your blog. Upload video directly to Blogger, and manage the videos in your blog’s settings.

Reminder

• Google Workspace stops supporting Internet Explorer 11 on March 15. If you are still running IE 11, it’s really time to update.

Upcoming

• March 18 is a free webinar from Google Publishers on Air: Consent Management Solutions and Improved Quality Signals for Publishers and Advertisers. It will cover Core Web Vitals for Publishers and Advertisers and Consent Status solutions.

More news: 

YouTube

• This month YouTube Analytics will start showing “Living Room Impression Data” with data from TVs, gaming consoles and the like. This will not change your views or revenue data, which has always included those sources.
• Eligible YouTube Creators can now sell digital and downloadable products from their Spring (formerly Teespring) merch shelf. The merch shelf is available to monetized channels with at least 10,000 subscribers.
• If you are making content that might be considered “adult”, be sure to see these quick videos with policy overviews from YouTube and AdSense.

Bloggers

• This week WordPress introduced Stories. You can use the WordPress mobile app to easily create an “engaging, tappable, full-screen slideshow” that is published on your site as a blog post. These are permanent web stories, rather than disappearing Instagram/Flickr/YouTube Stories.
• WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” was released, with new features that “let you do more without writing custom code”. Click the link for all the details.

Meetings & Communication

• Google Meet is getting tiled view on mobile. It’s rolling out on iOS and coming soon to Android.
• Did you know you can quickly start a new Google Meet video call by going to meet.new in your browser’s address bar? A neat quick tip from Google Workspace.
• The new Google Meet Dialing subscription adds the ability to dial out of Meet meetings to more than 100 countries, and dial in from more than 80 countries. These are paid calls via Meet, and is not required for calls to the United States or Canada. This is available to Google Workspace customers in the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Belgium.
• Google Workspace customers can now set up breakout rooms in advance in Google Calendar.
• If you are using the old Google Chat Electron-based app, be sure to switch to the Progressive Web App before the end of March.

Social Media

• Facebook is launching new monetization options for creators. There are midroll ads in videos that are at least 1 minute long, and in-stream ads for Live broadcasts. Plus fan-purchased Stars and paid online events in more countries. Note that monetization is only open to eligible Pages with at least 10,000 followers.
• The new Instagram Lite app is designed for entry-level phones, especially in locations that may have poor connectivity or slower networks.
• Twitter now lets you disable direct message reactions to your Fleets (Twitter Stories).
• TikTok wants to promote kindness by giving creators more tools to filter comments, and is showing a popup asking people to “reconsider” when they post a comment with words that may violate the community guidelines.

Productivity

• Google’s collaborative digital whiteboard Jamboard now lets you see the version history and restore previous versions. It works similarly to the versions in Google Docs.

Problems with AI

“AI” isn’t separate from people.

• From Aliide Naylor for Motherboard: Biased AI on Mechanical Turk: “Workers who label images on platforms like Mechanical Turk say they’re being incentivized to fall in line with their responses—or risk losing work.”
• From Karen Hao for MIT Technology Review: How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation. “The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them [Joaquin Quiñonero Candela] can't fix the problem”
• From Rachel Metz at CNN Business: How one employee's exit shook Google and the AI industry

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.

Photo: There are two fun holidays this coming week. March 14 is Pi day, a celebration of mathematics and pie. And March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day. Green clover by jeonsango on Pixabay. (Free for commercial use CC0)