Weekly Update - April 17, 2021: Blogger, YouTube, Chrome

Happy Earth Week! I hope you can take a little time this week to enjoy nature, if only in your backyard.

This week Blogger announced its Follow By Email service will be shut down, YouTube announced “Shorts” are getting their own shelf on channel pages and is testing “dubbed” videos, and Chrome has a new and improved PDF reader with presentation mode. And while this week was short on updates, there are a few more tips and tutorials.

New tutorial: Learn how to export your Blogger blog’s email follower list from FeedBurner. Use this to help you migrate your list to a different platform before FeedBurner’s RSS to Email service is turned off in July.

Earth Day is April 22. This year’s theme is “Restore our Earth”. Events will be mostly virtual yet again this year. Here’s how you can explore the Earth from home:

• Google Earth now lets you see a timelapse of changes with satellite photos covering the past 37 years. Go to goo.gle/timelapse to view highlights and explore changes in your own part of the world.
• You can use the interactive AR tool Floom on your Android device to see what’s on the opposite side of the world from you.
• Facebook is offering special Earth Day content on Oculus, stickers in WhatsApp, 360 backgrounds on Messenger and more.
• In the US, today is the first day of National Parks Week, which will feature both virtual and in-person events.

YouTube and Video

• All customized YouTube channel pages will be getting a “Shorts” section, which can be removed. That separates the Shorts from longer-form content.
• YouTube creator liaison Matt Koval has a new video that explains YouTube’s Creator Responsibility Initiative. This requires high profile popular creators to keep the “YouTube ecosystem” healthy even off the platform. This policy has been in place since early 2018, in response to Jake Paul’s bad behavior.
• YouTube is testing multiple audio tracks for video, which would allow viewers to switch between the original audio and dubbing in another language.
• Gaming livestream platform Lightstream was acquired by The Vitec Group’s Creative Solutions division. Lightstream’s gamer-focused live streaming tools look like they should be a good match for The Vitec Group’s other brands, which include camera accessories and broadcasting tools, including Teradek, Joby and more, from lights, to tripods, to teleprompters.

Bloggers and Webmasters

• FeedBurner is moving to more modern infrastructure in July (yay!), but removing some features in the process, including its RSS to Email service (boo). This powers Blogger’s Follow by Email gadget, so that will also stop sending new posts to email subscribers. You can export your subscriber list if you want to migrate to a different email service. Some other companies that offer RSS to Email, like FeedBlitz and AWeber, are already promoting their services as an alternative.

Productivity

• Chrome has some useful new features: “Link to highlight” to link to specific text on a web page, a new and improved PDF reader (with “presentation mode”) and changes that reduce CPU usage when multiple tabs are open.

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: Earth image by WikiImages from Pixabay