Weekly Update - August 21, 2021: YouTube, AdSense, Chat

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This week there are updates for YouTube creators, web publishers, podcasters and more.

Tutorial: If your YouTube channel content - videos, playlists, comments - is important to you, make a backup today!
Tutorial: Similarly if you have been working hard on your Blogger blog, back up your posts, pages, comments and theme.
Upcoming: On September 1, under-18 students using a Google Workspace for Education account will lose access to YouTube and Blogger.Affected users should download their YouTube and Blogger data as soon as possible. Watch a video overview.

YouTube is launching new features to improve search: you can view - and jump to - Chapters from the search results, preview snippets on mobile, and if there aren’t relevant search results in your language, you may see automatically translated captions, titles and descriptions when relevant content in the local language isn’t available. YouTube is also experimenting with showing website links from Google Search (so far only) in India and Indonesia.
AdSense has added three new settings to “Auto Optimize”: select the percentage of traffic you want to see the experiment, remove an ad style you don’t want experiments run on, and the option to block a particular experiment.
Google Chat is - finally! -getting dark mode on desktop.
Facebook launched Horizon Workrooms, which let you attend a virtual meeting using an Oculus Quest 2 headset. It uses Oculus Remote Desktop to let you bring your computer and keyboard into the meeting. If someone joins with video, rather than VR, they appear on the virtual screen in the virtual meeting room. If you have the right hardware and physical space (Facebook recommends 6.5 feet by 5 feet to use the virtual whiteboard), you can give it a try. Facebook promises not to use your work conversation and docs to target ads.

YouTube Trends highlights “The Rise of Aesthetics” with a look at Cottagecore, Dreamcore, Bardcore, Dark academia, Y2K, and Royaltycore and the music, fashions and decor that define them.
Watch this Creator Insider video to help understand a drop in watch time performance on your channel. One takeaway: it’s best to look at your stats over time, as performance tends to be highly volatile.
August 26 is StreamYard’s free Level Up Summit in English, Spanish and Portuguese. There are sessions on building community and growing your brand with live streaming.
If you have a paid Vimeo account, you can now automatically record your Zoom meetings to your Vimeo account. Note this is only available with paid Vimeo and Zoom accounts.

AdSense has posted a reminder that its content requirements do not allow promotion of harmful health claims or “relates to a current, major health crisis [COVID-19] and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus.” Also prohibited: content promoting hate groups, demonstrably false election-related claims. If you are monetizing your website or blog these policies apply to both your content and comments on your posts.
The latest episode of #AskGooglebot explains why a site: query in Google Search miay not show all pages.

OnlyFans is going to ban sexually explicit content, arguably why the platform is popular in the first place. Some nude content will still be allowed. The reason? OnlyFans says it was to appease “banking partners and payout providers”.
Pinterest is making it easier to find relevant beauty information by adding hair pattern filters. Refine your search for “summer hair styles” by limiting it to protective, coily, curly, wavy, straight or shaved/bald hair.
On the short vertical video front, Facebook is bringing Reels from Instagram to the main Facebook app. This is currently being tested for some users in the United States, India, Mexico and Canada.

Google Podcasts now lets you access the saved playlist queue of episodes on desktop. You can also now “Explore shows” on the web. You can find Google Podcasts at (naturally) podcasts.google.com.
Spotify’s Anchor is rolling out its Music + Talk podcast format to more countries.The platform makes it easy to add full-length Spotify tracks to a show. Plus it has a new look that “makes it stand out to more listeners”.

If you use Google Chat with a Google Workspace account, the new “trusted domains” lets you chat with members of a trusted organization, even if external chats are otherwise not allowed. This needs to be set up by your Google Workspace administrator.

It’s now easier to customize theme colors in Google Slides and Sheets.
Some Google Workspace users will be able to indicate where they are working from in Google Calendar. If you sometimes work at home, and other times go into the office, this can let your coworkers know where you are.
A useful tip from JR Raphael on how to enter a live interactive date in your Google Docs document or quickly insert a link to an upcoming Calendar event. Just start by typing @.

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: Threads by Andreas Lischka from Pixabay (free for commercial use)

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