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.

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Social Media and Young Adults report shows teen blogging on the decline originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

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Remove comments from your web experience with shutup.css originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Hands on with the WordPress app for Google Android

Hands on with the WordPress app for Google Android originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Blog on the go with WordPress for Android

Blog on the go with WordPress for Android originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

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Google discontinuing FTP support for Blogger blogs originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading After the Deadline grammar, spell check addon for Firefox is a writer's best friend

After the Deadline grammar, spell check addon for Firefox is a writer's best friend originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

FeedDemon 3.1 brings serious performance and social improvements originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

[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.

Posterous releases directory of themes originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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

How to subscribe to specific Download Squad feeds in your RSS reader originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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]

Posterous uses post.ly domain for Twitter updating service originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

CMP.ly offers disclosure badges to bloggers and advertisers originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

How to publish your blog feed to Twitter and Facebook originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Intel's AppUp store smells like netbook bloat - and a cash cow originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tumblr lets you ask questions of your favourite Tumblogs originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Is WordPress working on an app for Android? originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Palm's webOS App Catalog hits 1,000 apps originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 02 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

WordPress 2.9 arrives, with an image editor and a trash folder originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google makes it easier to monetize blogs with Amazon integration originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

1. New Trash bin allows you to retrieve deleted posts up to a certain period of time
2. Batch plugin updating
3. Community-based plugin compatibility checking
4. Ability to post image thumbnails
5. Exclude or include images from a gallery

WordPress 2.9 RC released: Now with in-line image editing originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Facebook and Google set up short URL services, competitors rush out to buy new pants originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.