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Creator Weekly: Podcasts in YouTube Music, Meet full HD video, Microsoft Designer

 


May is nearly upon us. I hope you are having sparkling (but not too hot) spring weather!

This week YouTube is offering more podcast features and shared details on how they create and enforce policy, Google Meet is launching full HD video streaming, Microsoft has an AI image editing tool you can use for free and more.

Now a question for you: would you be interested in listening to a podcast with a roundup of the latest creator news? I’m live on YouTube every Sunday and they could be turned into a YouTube podcast. Let me know in the comments or by replying to this newsletter!

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Creator Weekly Live

Join me live on Sunday for a recap of this week’s top updates! I’m live at 10:30AM Pacific time (5:30 UTC). Set a reminder on YouTube here.

Google Meet Video in Full HD

Google Meet is now allowing some meeting participants to set 1080p Full HD for incoming and outgoing video streams.

There are some limitations:
  • This is only available for (some) paid Google Workspace accounts. If you are using a personal Google account, you can subscribe to Google Workspace Individual or Google One with at least 2TB data (in eligible countries).
  • Only available in two person Meet meetings
  • Only available on the web
  • You must use a 1080p camera
  • Your computer must have sufficient processing power
  • You must have sufficient bandwidth to send 1080p video (Google has tips for setting up your network here)
  • If your computer setup supports 1080p video, you will see a prompt to enable it before joining the Meet meeting.
  • This feature will likely take several weeks to roll out to everyone.

As I have a 1080p webcam, I’m hoping to be able to give this a try. It is not clear if this will also increase the resolution of recordings or live streams from the meeting, so I’d like to test that out. If and when I do I’ll share the details of how it works with you all, of course.

YouTube Podcasts

Podcasts on YouTube are now available in YouTube Music in the US.

That means that if you are watching a podcast on YouTube proper, you can switch to YouTube Music to continue listening.

And YouTube Music lets you listen to podcasts offline, in the background, and while casting for free. Those are premium features if you are listening to music.

If you are a creator, setting a podcast is as easy as creating a podcast playlist of your episode videos in YouTube Studio.

Your podcasts may appear on the YouTube Podcasts page, as well as in YouTube Music.

And if you have your own website, you can add an official YouTube podcast badge.

Catch the Trends

Why pay attention to trends? I think it’s useful to know what people are watching and what other creators are doing, even if it’s not something I’d do myself. And maybe I’ll spot a trend that fits my style (definitely not dancing though).

YouTube has started a new blog series on rising trends, starting with virtual humans, narrative horror, majorette dancing, care for textured hair, and nail art. These are bigger, more general trends than what you find on the YouTube Trending tab, which shows you what is trending today.

If you want to keep on eye on what people are searching for, Google Trends lets you compare the popularity of search terms, and offers a Daily Trends email newsletter.

Pinterest has teamed up with the wedding planning platform Zola to share the latest wedding trends. Wedding trends are part of larger social and fashion trends, and include sustainability, budget mindedness and non-traditional and adventure weddings.

TikTok celebrated World Book Day and highlighted #BookTok creators.

And just a couple of weeks ago Instagram launched a destination for finding the latest trending music and hashtags on Reels.

More YouTube and Video News

YouTube’s Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie interviewed Matt Helprin, YouTube’s Global Head of Trust and Safety. They discussed how YouTube creates and enforces the Community Guidelines and answered frequent user questions. It’s a must watch for creators.

YouTube is rolling out copyright management on mobile. Learn more from Creator Insider.

YouTube is warning about a new type of phishing email. A YouTube channel impersonating an official channel shares a private video with you and warns you must click the link in the description and provide your account information. Don’t do that!

The official YouTube Creators channel has a new video walking through ways to use music in your videos.

AI Updates

Try this: Microsoft Designer is now officially in “Preview”. Describe your design, and upload an image or get an AI-generated image with text. The goal is to simplify designing images for social media or blog posts. Try it here: designer.microsoft.com (requires free Microsoft account). The AI tool will be automatically added to the sidebar in the Edge browser.

Also try this: LLaVA -- Large Language and Vision Assistant -- is a chatbot that answers questions about images. You can try it here (scroll down for demo images).

You can now disable chat history in ChatGPT. This prevents what you enter from being used to train the chatbot.

Microsoft’s Bing chatbot now handles travel and recipe citations more accurately. This is much better than Google’s Bard, which will offer a recipe or travel tips without linking to any sources.

Adobe AI Product Manager John Nack shared several videos demonstrating Adobe Firefly recoloring images.

Users are unhappy about Snapchat’s My AI. The biggest complaint seems to be how aggressively its been integrated into chat and how it seems to “lie”. To make things worse, you have to pay for a Snapchat+ subscription to remove it from your chat feed.

Social 

In last week’s Creator Weekly I wrote about Twitter removing legacy checkmarks and some of the chaos that followed. Shortly after I posted, Twitter added a checkmark back to many (most? Nearly all?) accounts with more than 1 million followers, including dead celebrities. There has been no announcement or explanation, and many receiving the blue tick were unhappy as it suggested they were endorsing (or at least paying for) a Twitter Blue subscription. 

It also led to some inadvertent comedy as a few affected accounts would change their name, which removes the checkmark, only to have it restored shortly thereafter. Why do this? It may be because the change that prioritizes Twitter Blue subscribers in replies and “For You” meant people started seeing a lot of low-quality Tweets. Badging celebrities may fix that problem. For an overview, see Alex Kirshner’s article in Slate about “How Elon Musk turned the blue check mark into a scarlet letter.

Tech reporter Casey Newton interviewed ex-Twitter Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth for This American Life.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, it has been complying with almost all government requests to remove content or turn over personal information. Previously Twitter must more frequently only partially complied with such requests or refused to comply with them at all.

Twitter Subscriptions have expanded to many more countries. If you set up Subscriptions, people can pay for special content.

Do you remember Clubhouse? It was the hot social audio app of 2021 (and presumably the inspiration for Twitter’s Spaces). They have laid off half their staff, and note that “as the world has opened up post-Covid, it’s become harder for many people to find their friends on Clubhouse and to fit long conversations into their daily lives.” It’s not clear what “Clubhouse 2.0” will be.

Meta has improved its cross-platform 3D avatars, with more body shapes and improved hair and clothing.

Social blogging platform Medium rolled out a new design with simpler article pages. Moving the clutter of buttons and other links away from the article is meant to help people focus on just reading.

Productivity

You can insert YouTube video data, including title, description and thumbnail, more easily into a Google Sheets using a smart chip.

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides has a new smart tool finder. Instead of digging through menus to find the tools you want to use, you just need to run a quick search. Google will also suggest tools you may want to use.

Google has introduced improved image insertion in Google Sheets and Slides.

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.

Header image background: Maypole by Andreas The_GADman on Pixabay. Free for commercial use.https://pixabay.com/photos/pole-maypole-folk-festival-season-7758764/

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