Creator Weekly: WordPress vs WP Engine, Meta AI Video Dubbing, TikTok Subscriptions

Last week YouTube and Twitch shared the new features they are working on. This week it was Meta’s turn. And yes, it’s new AI-powered features for Facebook and Instagram.

There are also updates for Google Photos, TikTok, AdSense, social media and more.

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To Do & Try

NotebookLM (notebooklm.google.com) now lets you use public YouTube videos and audio files as a source. Use Gemini in NotebookLM to summarize key concepts with inline citations that link back to the relevant part of the video transcript. And it’s also easier to share AI-generated audio overviews. Listen to the podcast-style audio overview of last week’s Creator Weekly live video. It’s absolutely wild to hear a “discussion” of implications of the updates I talked about. See also the OnEBoardChat discussion about using NotebookLM to write YouTube video descriptions.
This is your last chance to use Google’s Jamboard. On October 1, the Jamboard website (jamboard.google.com) and mobile apps will become view-only. You will not not be able to create or modify your Jams. You can migrate your Jams to FigJam, Lucid, or Miro. You can also export Jams as PDF or PNG files. Jamboard will shut down completely December 31.
Add a cover image to a report or other Google Doc document. You can use your own image or select a stock image. The catch? This is only an option if you use Pageless mode (meant to be read on the web). Note that this will take a couple of weeks to roll out to everyone.

WordPress versus WP Engine

A dispute between WordPress and WP Engine blew up this week, with the potential to impact many writers, businesses and others who have sites managed through WP Engine or through services that use WP Engine.

The short version is that WordPress.org, the non-profit that manages the WordPress open source project (not to be confused with the WordPress.com hosting platform) claims that WP Engine is violating its trademarks. Since they haven’t come to terms, WordPress.org cut off WP Engine’s access to its servers, which are used for things like updating plugins and themes and sign-in management.

But there is some drama, as Matt Mullenweg, CEO and founder of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, made some pretty harsh comments.

It started at WordCamp US, their big WordPress conference. In the closing speech, Mullenweg apparently singled out WP Engine as “enemy number one”.

That was followed by a post on the official WordPress.org blog declaring that “WP Engine is not WordPress”. It made two main points: that some people confuse WP Engine with WordPress (that’s related to the trademark claim), and that since WP Engine was acquired by a private equity firm, they mostly stopped contributing to the WordPress open source project (which apparently isn’t required by the licensing terms, but is expected anyway).

And then he went on to say WP Engine is a "cancer to WordPress" and "What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it."

WP Engine sent Mullenweg a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he "stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine." They also accused Mullenweg of threatening WP Engine if they did not agree to pay a "very large sum of money" before the September 20th WordCamp US Convention.

Matt Mullenweg then posted on X that WP Engine modified the WordPress dashboard news widget to prevent people from seeing the negative posts on the official WordPress blog. And that change supposedly broke "thousands of customer sites."

WordPress sent WP Engine their own cease-and-desist letter, stating that WP Engine is infringing the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, and demanded compensation for profits using the trademarks.

WordPress is an Open Source project, and if you want to install WordPress on your own server, you can do that. You can also modify it, if you want to. And you can install plugins manually. But WordPress also hosts services that make it easier to manage your site.

So it was significant that WordPress also banned WP Engine from their servers. In the announcement Mullenweg wrote, “WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free."

And, again, Mullenweg took a jab at WP Engine directly:

"Why should WordPress org provide these services to WP Engine for free, given their attacks on us?

WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it, with them getting all of the profits and providing all of the services. If you want to experience WordPress, use any other host in the world besides WP Engine."

To me it sounds like this is more personal than business. Someone claiming to be an ex-Automattic employee posted on Reddit that Mullenweg has long wanted all the bloggers and blogging platforms, including Blogger itself as part of WordPress.

This spat affects all of the WordPress sites hosted and managed by WP Engine, its subsidiary Flywheel, and Agency Partners. And it is rotten for the affected customers who are left uncertain about whether they should change hosts or take other actions.

Today, acknowledging that this is affecting , WordPress lifted the ban on its servers until October 1, saying “Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress.org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us.”

Will WP Engine be able to get things set up in just 4 days? It’s unclear. They are posting updates on their Status Page.

And this opens bigger questions within the WordPress community about how this is being managed and whether other WordPress service providers could be affected in the future. And the bigger question about how Mullenweg’s leadership is affecting the project.

As a side note, my post about this on Threads is by far my most popular social media post in a long time, with some good comments. Nice!

Meta’s AI Everywhere

This week was Meta Connect, Meta’s annual developer conference. Along with hardware announcements, they announced a number of new features that they are working on. Of course there is “AI” in all the things.

Voice chat with Meta AI. You can select the voice, including celebrity voices (Awkwafina, Dame Judi Dench, John Cena, Keegan Michael Key and Kristen Bell).
Video chats with AI versions of creators.
Share photos in chats with Meta AI and it can answer questions about it.
Meta AI can edit the photos you share with it, including changing the background and adding and removing objects.
When you reshare a photo from your feed to an Instagram Story, you can have Meta AI imagine a background to frame the image.
They are testing automatic translation of Reels in Instagram and Facebook, with automatic dubbing and lip-syncing. Initially this is being tested on videos from creators in the US and Latin America, in English and Spanish.
Meta AI can suggest captions for Stories on Instagram and Facebook.
Use the “Imagine” option to generate a fanciful version of yourself, when posting to your feed, Stories or Facebook profile photos.
You may see Meta AI-generated “imagined for you” content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, based on your interests or current trends.

Meta also announced Orion augmented reality glasses (what I wanted Google Glass to be!), updated Meta Ray Bans with AI features, and the Meta Quest 3S “affordable” mixed reality headset.

Watch @ Cleo Abram interview: The Future Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying To Build

Read @ The Verge: Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks AR glasses will replace your phone

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

TikTok expanded their Subscription option beyond live streamers. Now eligible video creators can open up paid subscriptions, and offer private chats and comments, exclusive content, and other perks.

Google Photos has updated their video editor in the mobile app. Android users have an updated trim tool, auto enhance that enhances colors and stabilizes videos “with one tap”, and a speed tool, to speed up or slow down the video. And both the iOS and Android app has new AI-powered editing presets that can “automatically trim the video, adjust lighting, control speed, or apply effects like dynamic motion tracking of the main subject, zooming in the main action, or applying slow-mo with just a few taps.”

Twitch shared more details about how its Shared Chat in Stream Together works. The creators streaming together can choose to combine their chats, but cheers and other monetization tools only apply to the channel where they occur, and events like Hype Trains, Shout Outs and Polls only appear on the channel they were initiated on.

Aprilynne Alter published an interesting interview with YouTube's VP of Creator Products, Amjad Hanif. Hanif heads up YouTube Analytics, Thumbnail A/B/C testing and other tools. Watch the interview to learn more about what YouTube is working on to help creators better understand their audience, how the updated inspiration tab works, reaching a wider viewership, and more.

Podcasting and Audio

Spotify for Podcasters has new “user journey” metrics, how many people you reached, how many people “showed interest” and how many people streamed the content.

Web Publishers and Search

If you monetize your own website or blog with AdSense, and the ads are not displaying, use the new AdSense Ads Not Showing Troubleshooter. Make sure you are signed into the Google Account you use for AdSense, and it will do a checkup on specific websites you have monetized.

CloudFlare has a new tool that lets website owners control access to their site by AI bots.

Barry Schwartz @ Search Engine Land reports: Google updates its spam policies document, with “more details around the site reputation abuse policy and expanding and clarifying other areas of its search spam policies and guidelines.”

And also: Google Cache Is Fully Dead

Social Media

The Social Web Foundation is a new non-profit focused on connecting social sites via the ActivityPub protocol (aka the Fediverse). It has advisors from companies including Mastodon, Flipboard, Automattic (WordPress, Tumblr), Meta (Threads), Medium, Ghost, Pixelfed, IFTAS, Vivaldi and more. It plans to focus on education, policy, "enhancing and extending the ActivityPub protocol" and building tools to make the social web easier to use.

Flipboard is federating 250 new publisher profiles (of more than 400 total), and 4,000 of their curated Magazines. This includes news organizations and popular magazines (Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Vanity Fair) and a few blogs. You can follow these from Mastodon or anywhere in the Fediverse.

Collages are apparently all the rage with GenZ. Pinterest just added collage sharing and collage remixing and you can create collages for your Amazon Storefront. Lindsey Gamble points out that many other platforms have added collage features as well. And maybe YouTube Posts and TikTok Photo Carousels are next?

Instagram’s Adam Mosseri noted that using third party apps to edit your videos will not affect reach unless they are watermarked. So don’t download a video from TikTok, instead use your video editor to make the same video for all the platforms you upload to, then upload to each individually. And, of course, don’t download to reshare other people’s videos.

There is a new Location option in Threads. Once you allow location sharing, you can tag a post with the location, and people can find your post by searching by location.

X is changing the way account blocking works, with a harder-to-find block button and the blocked user able to see your public posts. The way it works today (and on most platforms), is if you block someone, they can’t see your posts when they are signed into their account. You can’t browse profiles on X really at all while signed out.

Poynter reports It’s easy to find misinformation on social media. It’s even easier on X.

Social Media Today reports: Data Shows X Is Suspending Far Fewer Users for Hate Speech.

Reddit is rolling out automated post and comment translations in more than 35 countries.

LinkedIn now supports 10 new languages -- Bengali, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Persian, Vietnamese, and Marathi, Punjabi, and Telugu -- for a total of 36 supported languages.

FastCompany reports LinkedIn has quietly removed those AI-powered prompts that were appearing in the feeds of premium members

Communication and Collaboration

If you updated your Mac to macOS Sequoia you will need to grant permission for Google Meet in Chrome to access your screen before you record or present. I expect this is true for all video meeting platforms.

Google Earth is getting new features for both professionals and explorers. The new home screen will show your projects, let you collaborate (as you do in Google Drive), and upload your own KML datasets. You will also be able to explore historical imagery on mobile and the web, in some cases going back to the 1930s. For presentations, you can use abstract basemaps (simplified 3D images) and higher quality satellite imagery. And Google uses AI-powered Cloud Score+ to remove clouds and shadows. These will be available in the coming weeks.

Gemini in Gmail will create contextual smart replies. These are longer than the usual smart reply, and can be previewed and edited. This requires a paid subscription to Gemini for Google Workspace or Google One.

Does your schedule in Google Calendar look a bit different? Google is updating the illustrations for events (lunch, doctor’s appointment, and so forth) in the mobile app on Android and iOS devices.

You can now use Gemini in Google Sheets to build structured tables. This requires a paid Gemini subscription for Google Workspace or Google One. Learn more.

Google is making it easier to set up conditional notifications in tables in Google Sheets.

More AI Updates and News

Katie Notopoulos @ Business Insider: In defense of that 'Goodbye Meta AI' post that's all over Instagram. She points out that while it’s a hoax, it reflects real user sentiment.

Nieman Lab: A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. This is a horrific story, and the solution - to prevent the Copilot chatbot from answering questions about this one specific person - doesn’t scale to everyone.

Peggy K's Creator News

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