YouTube and Video
YouTube answered questions about Shorts on the Creator Insider channel. YouTube is working on Shorts-specific analytics, which is good news. Is it OK to create Shorts from existing longer videos? Yes, repurpose your content! Do you need a separate Shorts channel? It depends…
Learn more.
Meta is cracking down on “watchbait” videos on Facebook. Their automated systems detect and reduce the distribution of such videos. What is watchbait? That’s videos where the title, thumbnail or description are misleading, overly sensationalized, or create an “arbitrary curiosity gap”
Web Publishing
Google is rolling out an update that should
improve their ability to identify high quality product reviews to better rank them in
Search results. Google has also
provided recommendations for writing what they consider to be a high quality review. What are they looking for? Helpful in-depth details, unique information (not just the manufacturer’s specs), hands-on evaluations, and comparisons to similar products. Hopefully that means fewer articles that are just promoting affiliate products, and more useful content at the top of the search results.
Social Media
Instagram is rolling out the ability for everyone (starting with the US) to
tag products in their posts. From the example it looks like it’s a way to add product ads to your posts, but maybe this is a good thing if you are following beauty posters or tech reviewers or the like.
Snapchat has acquired neurotech company NextMind, which has developed brain-computer interfaces for augmented reality (AR) and more.
Social Media Today’s Andrew Hutchinson points out Meta (Facebook) has also been working on “brain-to-screen” interfaces. It will be interesting to see if anything exciting comes out a few years from now.
Communication
Zoom has launched video avatars. These are cartoony 3D head-and-shoulder animated animals that replace your video feed. You can use them to “delight your colleagues” (!?), engage children, or “create a special surprise for your webinar panelists”. This is available for Windows, macOS or iOS devices.
Other new Zoom features: live stream to Twitch directly, share audio with all breakout rooms, updates to Zoom Events, and video messaging in Zoom Chat.
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Giga Manga lets you create your own manga-style drawings with the help of machine learning. This is part of
Manga Out of the Box, a collaboration between the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; a number of other Japanese cultural organizations and Google Arts & Culture.