Filed under: Blogging

Pew Internet released a report yesterday called Social Media and Young Adults that shows teen blogging down by 50% over the past four years, even as blogging increased among those over 30 years old.

The report also shows that teens are not very likely to be Twitter users (only 8% of internet users between the ages of 12 and 17 report using the service), even though they are heavy users of almost all other online applications; in fact, 73% of "wired American teens" are social networking website users. Twitter seems to stick out as a service that younger people are not as interested in.

Interestingly, even as MySpace popularity wanes overall, young people are still almost double as likely to maintain a profile there as are older adults, who have moved on to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

The report's summary has a ton of other interesting statistics about social network and wireless usage, which as Mashable points out, seems to indicate that teens just don't seem to be very interested in content creation, compared to adults. This seems somewhat counterintuitive, but you can't argue with the numbers.

I have a love/hate with blog comments... I love to hate them. (ba-dum tssss -- I'm here all week, folks. Don't forget to tip your waitress (Seb)) No, but seriously, there are times when the comment area of an otherwise useful blog post gets filled up with bluster and vitriol instead of helpful supportive comments. While I don't mind healthy debate, sometimes things get out of control, like they did recently at Engadget.

Depending on the sites you frequent, comments can be useful, benign, or downright negative. If you don't find that you get a lot of value out of comments, why not turn them off? I don't mean turn them off for your own site, though you could do that too, I mean turn them off web-wide.

That must have been the thought process Steven Frank went through when he put together shutup.css, a style sheet that will suppress comments from most sites. It works by hiding blocks with IDs like "comments", which you should be aware could affect some sites in ways you might not expect. But if you'd like to have a comment-less experience while browsing Engadget even now that they've turned comments back on, shutup.css might just be the ticket.

The file can be applied as a custom stylesheet in Safari, and the post links to solutions for both Firefox and Chrome.

The team at Automattic is committed to making mobile blogging work with WordPress, and they're proving it with a new Wordpress Android app. WordPress for iPhone finally became usable with version 2, and the Android app seems to have skipped over the awkward growing pains the iPhone version went through. It already supports posting and editing on multiple accounts, as well as comment moderation.

You can easily upload photos from your phone to your blog with the WordPress app, but it's not entirely reliable. ReadWriteWeb found that photo uploads crashed the app on their Nexus One. Your mileage may very. If the phenomenal improvement between v1 and v2 of the iPhone app is any indication, the Android app will work its kinks out quickly. Besides, there's nothing else quite like it in the Android Market. Whether you're hosting your own WordPress blog or using wordpress.com, your Android phone is now blog-ready, and that's pretty cool.

Check out Wordpress's official demo video after the jump.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Love it or hate it, Blogger was the tool that really brought blogging into the mainstream. Once upon a time, the only way to have your blog hosted on your own domain was to use Blogger as the content management system, but then have it use FTP to push HTML pages to your web host.

Fast forward to 2010, and it turns out that only half of one percent of Blogger's users are using Blogger's FTP upload ability, but maintaining that functionality is consuming considerably more than that percentage of Blogger's engineering resources. Worse, Google is dropping the infrastructure that Blogger uses to push out FTP updates, which would then require a complete rewrite of the code that handles Blogger's FTP processing.

So, Google has decided to drop FTP support from Blogger. Though the numbers clearly show that overall it's not that popular, I think some people still think Blogger's killer feature is the ability to FTP plain HTML files.

The one saving grace is that if you are currently hosting a site that is updated by Blogger with FTP, you're not going to lose anything except the ability to continue to update the site - if it's an old site, it will keep on keepin' on. That's the beauty of HTML files. If you are still actively blogging, however, you'll want to check out the new Blogger FTP blog they've set up to try to help migrate users to their custom domains solution.

After the Deadline has been mentioned before here on Download Squad. In September of 2009, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) acquired ATD and promptly integrated it into their wildly popular blogging platform.

If you do any writing anywhere on the web and you're using Firefox, you'll be glad to know that the After the Deadline add-on has hit version 1.0 and should be shedding Mozilla's experimental tag very soon.

In case you're not familiar with it, ATD is a brilliant proofreading tool. It can handle everything from common typos to misused punctuation, redundancies, double negatives, and other grammatical gaffs.

Install the Firefox add-on and you can tap its proofreading powers virtually anywhere you can type. It's well worth adding to your writer's toolbox even if you are a master of the written word -- it never hurts to have backup, after all!

Curious what goes on behind the scenes? Check out this recent blogpost which describes in gloriously geeky detail how ATD comes up with spelling suggestions.

Want to see the ATD add-on in action? Take the jump, and check out the video from the WordPress crew!

Google Reader is really dominating in the world of RSS readers, but if you're looking for a desktop experience that has the best of what Google Reader offers, but a faster and more desktop-like experience on Windows, you definitely need to check out FeedDemon.

The latest version of FeedDemon, newly release 3.1 offers some serious performance improvements from 3.0, which was a feature release that included Google Reader synchronization as its major point of interest. FeedDemon 3.1 also includes a new Shared By People I Follow feature, which brings Google Reader's shared items functionality into FeedDemon.

You can now also filter the posts in the feeds that you are subscribed to based on keywords. You can show posts only if they include certain keywords, or filter out posts if they include certain keywords. This can make subscribing to a very busy feed more manageable because you can completely hide the content you are not interested in seeing.

[Update - As noted in the comments, it appears that themes.posterous.com is not an official directory of themes as the title of this post suggests, but rather is a 3rd-party theme directory that cleverly grabbed the "themes" subdomain at posterous.com.]

The super-simple blogging platform Posterous has released a theme directory, offering up eight new themes in addition to the five default themes offered right from within Posterous's management interface. To download the new themes you must be a member of posterous.us, a forum dedicated to helping users make the most of their Posterous blog.

Once you create your posterous.us account, you can download the theme, which amounts to simply a text file containing the code for a CSS stylesheet. Copy the text and paste it into the management interface for your Posterous blog in the Theme > Advanced section, apply the change, and you're all set.

We often get comments from readers who would like to be able to subscribe to specific feeds here on Download Squad -- Windows, Google, Firefox -- you get the picture.

As it happens, you've always been able to do that. Here's how!

The easiest method is to check out our Feeds Page. You'll find direct links to dozens of specific RSS feeds for the categories we use. Whether you're an Open Source supporter, keen to stay on top of web browser news, or just looking for Time Wasters to kill your productivity there are loads of dedicated feeds listed.

You can also subscribe to a specific author. Underneath the title of any post you'll see his or her name -- and just to the right of that you'll see (RSS feed). Like Jay's posts? Just grab his RSS link from any post he's penned!

Here's another handy tip...

We've started using tags more heavily than categories (for various reasons). For an even more personalized experience you can subscribe to a specific tag! To add a tag feed, use the following format:

http://www.downloadsquad.com/tag/yourtaghere/rss.xml

Tags are listed at the end of every post. We try to be straightforward with them - Google, Chrome, Firefox, Windows, Facebook. You'll notice some Categories and Tags clash -- if anything, we'll be dropping categories in favor of tags, but we'll let you know of any changes if and when they happen.

There you have it! Feel free to custom tailor your Download Squad RSS experience any way you choose, and thanks again for reading!

The super-simply blog platform Posterous has just released a new feature on its post.ly domain, which was previously used only as a URL shortener. For those that are not familiar, Posterous is a blogging platform that makes posting dead simple. You just send an email to post@posterous.com, and if you don't already have a blog there one is created for you. Subsequent emails are treated as new posts.

As much as the email-based ease of use is great, Posterous' real claim to fame is how seamlessly the service handles media. Attach photos or video, and they are automatically embedded into the resulting post. Include the URL to an online video, and the video is embedded. Posterous can also cross post to various platforms. So if you attach a photo to your post, it can be embedded into the post, but also automatically uploaded to your Flickr account. And of course, it includes Twitter integration, so new posts are tweeted on your account.

All along Posterous has been looking at post creation as something you do from your email client, but today's post.ly release tackles it from the other side. Post.ly is an online Twitter updater that allows you to attach files and even add more text beyond the 140 characters that Twitter supports. All of this is then compiled into a tidy Posterous blog post, and a post.ly URL is appended to your tweet.

If you already have a Posterous account, you're all set; just navigate to post.ly and start updating. IF you don't have a Posterous account yet, you basically just do the same thing. You'll have to authorize post.ly to update your Twitter account using OAuth, but after that creating a tweet through post.ly will automatically create a Posterous blog for you.

[via TechCrunch]

Since the FTC is now requiring bloggers and advertisers to clearly disclose in a conspicuous fashion when an author has received a payment for writing a post, bloggers have chosen to tackle the issue in various ways. Some sites (like Download Squad) are able to post a blanket policy because they don't accept any kind of payment in return for posting. Others take the opposite approach, offering a blanket statement that says readers should assume they are paid for everything - a particularly good example of this is Tim Ferris' fun disclosure page.

If, like many bloggers, you fall somewhere between on this issue, you might need to be more granular, and disclose payment on a case-by-case basis. Of course, you can always do this in the text of what you write, but if you want something standard you can just link to, have a look at what CMP.ly is offering.

CMP.ly offers a set of 5 standard disclosures using very short URLs that you can link to, as well as a sixth custom disclosure that you can modify to meet a specific scenario if you create an account. The URLs are short enough that they can be used anywhere that you write online, to make sure you're really covering your, well, all your bases.

There are many ways to automatically update your Twitter feed when you create a new post on your blog. There are two that we'll look at that will work with any content management system that outputs an RSS feed: Twitterfeed, and Feedburner.

When it comes to externally hosted utilities like this, I rate them in two basic ways: functionality, and reliability. In this case, there's not a clear winner, since Twitterfeed beats Feedburner hands-down when it comes to functionality, but the opposite is true when it comes to reliability.

Twitterfeed offers more control over how it updates your Twitter account, and gives you the added benefit of also being able to update Facebook at the same time. Feedburner only updates Twitter, and offers fewer configuration settings.

Personally, I've settled on Twitterfeed for now because it solves two problems for me with its ability to update Facebook, but it has already had an outage at a very inconvenient time (the launch of a new blog), so for me it's on notice; any further outages and I'm switching to Feedburner.

If you're interested, Feedburner's Twitter update function is hidden away in the Publicize tab, down under the Socialize link on the left menu.

It's not that I don't understand what Intel is trying to do with AppUp - their angle is pretty clear. There's plenty of potential profit if Intel negotiates distribution deals with OEMs and can get AppUp preinstalled on millions of netbooks.


But what's the big selling point for the consumer?

There are, after all, loads of great sites you can already visit to download freeware and shareware: Filehippo, FreewareFiles, Download.Com, Softpedia, and many others. Unlike plain old download sites, however, AppUp requires you to submit payment information - even if you're only interested in downloading free apps.

Ultimately, it's about brand recognition and convenience. The average Joe doesn't know much about finding safe, useful software online and AppUp will be right there - waiting patiently on netbooks for a user to pull out his or her credit card to pay for a program "tailor-made" for Atom-powered systems.

People have always been willing to pay for trust and convenience, and AppUp is built on that premise. It could well turn into as big a cash cow as the preinstalled McAfee and Norton software users think they need to lock in to for eternity.

Some nerd (seriously, it takes a nerd to uncover this kind of thing) has just discovered that WordPress now hosts an android.wordpress.org subdomain. It's currently a protected blog with nothing to see, but...

I never thought I'd be the type to report website subdomain rumors (what next, trawling trademark repositories?) but this is one of those things that's more a matter of when rather than if. There are already iPhone and BlackBerry apps so it's only natural that Android would be next. Whether it will support video blogging like the BlackBerry app or if it'll be akin to a crippled geriatric like the iPhone's remains to be seen.

The Blog Herald (I meant 'some nerd' in a nice way, incidentally) goes on to mention that the app will probably coincide with the Nexus One's release, rumored to be released on January 5th.

If that's the case, you can expect a Download Squad review of the app in just a couple of days!