Peggy K's Creator News

This week Google announced new AI editing tools in Google Photos and Canva announced a whole Magic Suite of AI editing tools. It seems like an ongoing theme. There are also updates from YouTube, Google Search and for Google Drive, Calendar, Meet and Chat. Top news and updates this week Google announced the new Pixel phones and new Google Photos editing tools. Canva launched Magic Studio, a suite of generative AI image, video, presentation and text tools. Patreon now allows all creators to include free members and use the Commerce platform to sell audio, video and other digital files. Plus it has a blobby blurry new logo. Is it still worth it to share links on social media? Traffic from X (Twitter) and Facebook to news sites has plummeted and X is no longer showing link previews. Google Earth projects are now stored in Google Drive, accessible from all of your devices and available for collaboration. Goog...

Today I got access to Google's chatbot named Bard, and I've been giving it a spin.  According to  the Bard FAQ , Bard is based on Google's   LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications)  conversational AI model. Google is clear that they did not use data from Gmail or other private apps for training. Google also is very clear that it is not designed to return facts, help you code, or tell you about itself. Instead it is promoted as a creative tool that can help you brainstorm ideas for a party or write a draft email. As Google notes: LLM [Large Language Model] experiences (Bard included) can hallucinate and present inaccurate information as factual. When you sign in to Bard for the first time, there is a popup that makes it clear:  Bard is an experiment As you try Bard, please remember: Bard will not always get it right Bard may give inaccurate or inappropriate responses. When in doubt, use th...

The end of the year is a busy time, and I like to keep track of what I need to do by keeping a checklist. I've done it with pencil and paper and with various apps, but the one I find most useful is Google Keep.  Keep lets you easily create free-form notes and checklists with attached links, images and audio recordings that are available anywhere you can access your Google account.  Here are my favorite Google Keep features: 1. Keep notes synchronize between desktop and mobile apps. It's all free. 2. Integration with Google Docs, Calendar and Gmail on desktop. 3. Attach photos or other images to a note or list.  4. Add a drawing (or handwritten note). 5. Grab the text from a photo, image or drawing.  6. Add an audio recording, with a transcription of voice recordings in English. 7. Use Google Assistant to create a note or add to a list. 8. Save web pages using the Chrome Keep extension. 9. Collaborate with o...

I’ve been thinking about infrastructure. Not so much physical roads and buildings, but rather what keeps websites and online services running. There are always lots of complaints when Google (or any other company) makes significant changes to their sites and services. People want to know why they can’t keep running the old version along with the new version? And even if they wanted to do that, often it’s not possible. Because of changes in the underlying infrastructure.  Google has been pretty open of late about these technical changes, if you know where to look for the information. For example , YouTube’s Creator Studio Classic was written in the Python 2 programming language (hat tip Eric Parker ), which was sunsetted on January 1, 2020. Over the years the code base became complicated and unwieldy, they decided to start fresh with the new YouTube Studio. Blogger’s interface has also undergone a major transformation this year. While it has long needed an update, there was no way...

These are interesting times. Many folks here in California have been encouraged - or required - to start working from home, including employees at Google, Facebook and Twitter. Events have been cancelled, many schools have gone online, and cultural attractions are closed, but even so, we don’t have it bad here compared to many other places around the world. And life goes on. Not surprisingly, coronavirus-related updates and tips dominated this week. YouTube mobile apps have a new Explore tab, replacing the Trending ta b. There are buttons to find music, news, gaming, beauty, learning, and movie content; a more prominent Creator on the Rise section; and, of course, trending videos. Gmail will let you create and use multiple email signatures . Google Sheets now lets you sort and filter cells by text or fill color and set custom table ranges for charts . You can now fix an image to a specific place in your Google Docs document. Plus there is a new sidebar with image formatt...

恭喜发财! 새해 복 많이 받으세요! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! Happy New Year! This week there are new permissions in YouTube Studio, new Search Collection tools to collaboratively save links, search tools to find datasets on the web and updates for video creators, webmasters, and more To celebrate the Lunar New Year Google is showing a special Year of the Rat doodle in Vietnam , South Korea , China, the US, and a number of other countries . Click the link to learn more and see cute illustrations of rats and other zodiac animals. You can now add Managers, Editors or Viewers to your YouTube Studio if your YouTube channel is on your Google account , and not a Brand Account. Watch for my tutorial next week! Get a sneak peek at YouTube’s new caption editor on Creator Insider. You can now use a green screen when live streaming in Stream Yard . Stream Yard has grown in leaps and bounds, starting with 100 broadcasters on January 1, 2019 and growing to 16,000 broadcasters at the beginning of 2020. Byte is ...

One way to make your content timely and interesting is to build it around events and holidays, big and small. Audiences are international, so it can be helpful to know about holidays worldwide. And, depending on your audience, it's also worth considering niche and internet-based events (like National Bird Day or  Talk Like a Pirate Day ). The important thing is to plan your holiday-related content far enough in advance that you have time to write a blog post or shoot a video that your audience will find interesting and entertaining. YouTube, for example, suggests creating content around "tent-pole events", with some specific suggestions for health and fitness channels , beauty channels , and food channels . And they suggest creating a programming calendar and generating buzz for your event-related videos. And AdSense suggests that you can combat the usual post-December-holiday drop in traffic and earnings by focusing on other seasonal peaks , from Lunar New Year...

AdSense is notifying publishers that sites need to comply with the Better Ads Standards  to prevent Chrome from filtering ads starting July 9th. Google joined the Coalition for Better Ads in 2017, and began filtering ads on sites in North America and Europe in February 2018 . Earlier this year, they  announced that Chrome would no longer show "disruptive ads" globally  starting July 9th. The notice says: Global Better Ads Standards. Google Chrome will support the Better Ads Standards globally from July 9th. Ads may be filtered on Chrome browsers if you don't comply with the standard. The idea is that annoying ads can cause a poor user experience and drive people to install ad blocker s. Block the annoying ads automatically, and maybe people won't install ad blockers that block "good" ads too. To see the AdSense notice, sign in to your AdSense accoun t and click the bell icon at top right. The notice doesn't include details on how you can do t...

The Internet Archive is a non-profit online library that includes free books, movies, music and the Wayback Machine. What is the Wayback Machine ? Internet Archive's web archive, launched in 1996, contains over 2 petabytes of data compressed, or 150+ billion web captures, including content from every top-level domain, 200+ million web sites, and over 40 languages. There is an ongoing effort to save a copy of public Google+ content to the Wayback Machine. That probably won't be able to archive everything before April 2nd. If there are specific public posts or pages on Google+ that you want to be sure are archived, you have several options. I've been using the Wayback Machine Chrome Extension to archive some of the Google+ official announcements to create links for my blog won't break. How can you help or archive a copy of your favorite posts? Enter the URL into the form at  archive.org/web/ Use the Wayback Machine extension or add-on in your browser: Chr...

The goo.gl link shortening service will be shut down on March 30, 2019. This is your last chance to download your short link information. Note that the short links will continue to redirect correctly, you just won't be able to create new goo.gl links or view data about your existing goo.gl links. Google's replacement is Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL ), which are designed for app developers. Existing short goo.gl links short links will not be migrated to the Firebase console/API.