The first version of the Wordpress iPhone app showed a lot of promise as mobile blogging tool, but it was too slow and too buggy to use. It didn't know what to do with dropped connections -- all too common, when you're blogging from an AT&T iPhone -- and the UI was clunky and unintuitive. Round 2! Wordpress is back for another try at the iPhone thing, and this time they're far closer to doing it right: bug fixes, persistence, auto-saving and a better UI make Wordpress 2 a viable option for blogging on the go.

The single most important new feature in Wordpress 2 is persistence. That means you can close the app, and reopening it will take you back to the post or comment you were working on. In the old version, it was nearly impossible to finish a long post without being interrupted by a crash or a phone call, or without needing to pop into Safari to grab some text from a webpage. Speaking of those crashes, they're nowhere near as frequent as they were in Wordpress 1, and the new autosave feature makes them less damaging.

Photo uploading is smoother, too, and you can also preview a post while you're editing it. Aside from all the improvements to posting, comments now have their own tab, so you can moderate your site with ease. I'd still love to see liveblogging support in the iPhone app, though, because it seems like such an ideal use of a mobile blog client. All in all, Wordpress 2 is a workable solution for mobile blogging.

Tumblr is a quick and flexible blogging platform, which makes it well-suited to the iPhone. The Tumblr iPhone app has been in need of an update for some time now, though, so avid tumbloggers will be happy to hear that version 1.1 of the app has been submitted to the App Store and should be available soon. One of the developers of Tumblr for iPhone has posted a sneak preview of the new features in 1.1 on (what else?) his tumblr.

Although the flashiest new feature is video uploading, this update also addresses a lot of the gripes I have with the current version of the Tumblr app. There's finally a built-in web browser, so you don't have to go to Safari and lose your place in the dashboard every time you click a link. There's also a bookmarklet for easier tumbling, although the developer hasn't revealed how it works. Even basic posting is better, with a native editor and access to advanced options.

If you've been reluctant to use Tumblr on your iPhone because the app wasn't up to par, this update makes it look like a good time to reconsider.

So that we're not the only single blog in the known universe and beyond who misses the chance to comment on the FTC's boneheaded guidelines requiring bloggers, celebs, reviewers and others -- basically anyone who you might read online -- to disclose any "material relationship" with companies they review.

I tend to look at everything in terms of Pros and Cons. Here's the list I came up with.

The bad

• The FTC has passed an over-reaching regulation which is unenforceable at best, and is a violation of free speech at worst.

The good

• The FTC has passed an over-reaching regulation which is unenforceable at best, and is a violation of free speech at worst.

There are about a million better things the FTC could be doing with its time. Even if you wanted to narrow the to-do list to just Internet related issues, the list is still enormous. How about click-fraud? Noni Juice? Teeth Whiteners? Loose 200 pounds in 37 seconds? And all those hot single girls who are looking for a man like you -- and happen to be conspicuously located in teh same city as what geo-location returns for the IP of your upstream router?

There's a significant amount of misunderstanding of how Internet publishing works in this regulation, but this is the moment where I find the clue train leaves the station with absolutely no-one aboard. AdAge reports that Richard Cleland, assistant director- division of advertising practices at the FTC interprets the regulation to include, "posts on review sites such as Yelp or online stores such as Amazon."

Does that mean when I drop a review on Urban Spoon of my favorite eatery -- who happen to throw me a freebie every once in a while for being a loyal customer -- the FTC will sick it's blogger enforcement team on me? When they figure out exactly how to enforce this, call me.

Until then I'll be driving the Windows 7 box graphics wrapped Porsche Cayman that Microsoft sent me. *

* Kidding. But Ballmer, if you're interested, drop me an email and I'll send you my address

For what it's worth, take the jump to read my quick diatribe on Weblogs, Inc gimmies policy -- which is likely the strictest in existence among blog networks.

I've made no secret of my love for super-simply blogging platform Tumblr in the past here at Download Squad, so you can imagine the dilemma I faced upon hearing that Tumblr launched a few (ahem) realtime features today to allow users to discover all-new content on the service. As always, the Tumblr Wire page is slickly designed and live-updating as more content comes in - though if you're looking for a slightly more moderated stream of content, the lower half of the page continues to show the week's top posts.

Tumblr say they're also going to be making a few design changes over the coming weeks which may leave some items 'out of place before everything is done', and the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice today's launch of a slightly sharper Dashboard design.

What could be more compelling than documenting the lives of characters from the video game The Sims? Okay, it doesn't sound all that compelling, and there are many examples on the web of it being done poorly. But once in awhile someone comes along and does something that seems like a bad idea in such spectacular fashion that it truly becomes noteworthy.

Alice and Kev is a blog by Robin Burkinshaw that documents the lives of two characters he created in The Sims 3, the latest iteration of Electronic Arts' blockbuster game franchise. The two characters are a father and daughter, and Burkinshaw decided that to make things interesting he would give his characters some real challenges, such as homelessness and in the case of the father, Kev, insanity.

The resulting story is somehow both heart-rending and hilarious. Burkinshaw's blogging style is almost entirely graphical, with occasional pithy comments thrown in. The few comments he includes give the story life, and the characters really do feel all too real.

Reading the comments for each update is almost as entertaining as the posts themselves; Alice and Kev have a huge following, and an average post results in 100 or more comments by people who seem to genuinely care about this duo, and the other characters they are involved with.

It's an inspired bit of storytelling, a bit of a surprise given the usual fare when it comes to Sims blogging.

[via Boing Boing]

There are many ways to share your content online with family and friends. From Flickr to Facebook to MySpace, YouTube and Twitter, there's no shortage of ways, or platforms, to express yourself via words, pictures and videos. Several months ago I was introduced to another of these type of sites called Posterous.

At Posterous, much like these other sites, you can post words, pictures and videos via email from whatever device you happen to be using -- be it iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry or desktop computer. At first, I was a bit skeptical about how Posterous would distinguish itself from the other sites and platforms I use regularly.

However, once I started using Posterous and had my own page, I was quickly impressed with its simplicity, its design and its usability. Soon it became my site of choice for posting images on the go from my iPhone and may very well replace Flickr as my photo site of choice in the near future.

Recently, I talked with Sachin Agarwal, one of Posterous' co-founders, to get all the latest info on the site, how it came to be and where its going.

CHRIS ULLRICH: First off, let's talk a bit about your background. Where did you grow up, go to school, work and develop the skills to do something like Posterous?

SACHIN AGARWAL: Garry and I both went to Stanford and majored in Computer Science. When I graduated, I worked at Apple on Final Cut Pro for 6 years which was all the way up to starting Posterous. I was building the real-time playback engine and effects architecture.

That didn't have a direct impact on the formation of Posterous, except that we're definitely Apple people at heart, and we want to be the Apple of blogging. We want to make the simplest, most beautiful site out there, and make it accessible to the masses.

CU: When did you first have the idea for Posterous, how is it put together and when did it first go live?

You may remember Tumblrette as the fantastic Tumblr iPhone application I told you about way back in November. It was (and remains) a super-slick and stylish way for iPhone users to post to Tumblr, however today the folks at Tumblr have announced they've bought Tumblrette: and made it their own free "Tumblr for iPhone" application [App Store Link].

Not content with setting the application free (though its original $1.99 price was hardly bank-breaking), the folks at Tumblr have also added support for the iPhone-style Tumblr Dashboard and a bookmarklet so that you can easily post links right from the iPhone's Safari browser.

The ever-slick (and now free) application is available in an AppStore near you!

Lately, there's been plenty of news about Google and intellectual property. First we heard (or rather, didn't hear) videos go silent on YouTube. Now we've learned that they're also targeting bloggers who post mp3 files on Blogger.com.

The problem is, some of the people sharing songs are doing so at the request of artists and their promoters. That's the case with Ryan's Smashing Life, whose story has been picked up by LA Weekly and Rolling Stone.
In November, some of Ryan's posts began disappearing. There were no takedown notices. The posts were not unpublished. They were unceremoniously deleted without warning.

What's going on behind the scenes are the same idiotic practices that have plagued the music industry for ages. The promoters push material to people like Ryan for publicity without talking to corporate muckety-mucks. The suits get mad, and blame the little guy. Google hosts the content, so the labels order them to grab the intellectual ballbat and make with the kneecapping.

In Google's defense, surely there's something in the Blogger.com TOS that permits this sort of thing, but these actions don't do anything to further Google's friend-of-the-people image.

Ultimately, though, it's the bass-ackwards business model of the music industry that continues to frustrate and inconvenience the rest of us who just want to listen to our music.

[ via Inquistr ]

First, there were blog comments. But then there were Twitter, FriendFeed, Disqus, Google BlogSearch, and a host of other ways people could attach feedback to a particular URL. YackTrack is a service that aims to help you see all of these different types of comments in the same place. Just enter a URL, and it will return every comment on that URL that it can find across multiple services.

YackTrack is just getting started, so new features are rolling out quickly. There's already a bookmarklet you can use to avoid unnecessary copying and pasting, and a FeedFlare you can use to track a given URL. On top of that, YackTrack features a "chatter" search, so you can see what people around the web are saying about any given search term. I tested it out with my name, and it looks like a fantastic ego-surfing tool. It's probably even more useful if you're in customer relations and want to track what people are saying about your product and service. You can even subscribe to the search results as an RSS feed.

I'll give Brad a pass on being a tad premature with the WordPress 2.7's announcement, because I know that he -- like many of us who use WordPress to power our self-hosted blogs -- was just super-excited about the new release. Well, the wait is over and the official release for WordPress 2.7 is now available from WordPress.org.

WordPress 2.7, named "Coltrane" in honor of the Jazz legend, is a pretty significant step forward in WordPress's history. As Brad noted in his first look at the 2.7 beta, most of these changes are on the backend, but they are designed to greatly enhance your productivity and speed in maintaining your blog. On the front-end side, threaded comment support and support for "sticky" posts make it easier for readers to communicate with one another and access important information.

You can check out the WordPress Codex for 2.7 to see some of the technical details behind the new changes. I had a chance to talk to Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers for WordPress .org, about the new release and some of his favorite features.

Edit: As Matt was kind enough to point out, WordPress.com will see the roll out of WordPress 2.7 sometime this evening. There is no official word on when WordPress.org will release the self-hosted version, though the first release candidate is available now. -- CEW
--
It's a bit behind schedule, but WordPress 2.7 is due out tomorrow evening. Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform put out the first release candidate version of WordPress 2.7 just a few days ago, but a beta version has been available for the last few months.

WordPress 2.7 represents a huge shift away from earlier versions of WordPress - at least in the administration area. Most of the changes will be visible to bloggers, but not blog readers. But the changes in the admin area are huge. First, the navigation menus have all been moved to the left side of the screen, giving you more room at the top of the page. The submenus are all also collapsible, which allows you to navigate the administration interface without reloading the page as often.

You can also customize the admin area by dragging, dropping, adding, or deleting widgets like the Right Now screen which gives you an overview of your blog stats or the QuickPress widget which lets you create a post using a stripped down WYSIWYG editor right from the start page.

WordPress 2.7 also lets you search for and install plugins without leaving the admin area. And for the first time, an automatic upgrade tool is included in WordPress so you can upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 or 2.8 or whatever new versions are on the horizon without having to fire up an FTP client.

The upgrade tool also means that if you just can't wait until tomorrow to try out the new version of WordPress you can install the release candidate today and initiate an automatic upgrade tomorrow. For some reason WordPress still does not provide a simple way to backup your database before upgrading though, so you may want to install a third party plugin to backup your data before upgrading just in case something goes wrong.

On my list of 14 extremely useful Firefox addons I included ScreenGrab for capturing web pages to PNG or JPG images.

Today, I replaced it with Screen Grab to Wordpress. As you probably guessed, it's got the same core functionality with one major addition: the ability to send images directly to your Wordpress-powered blog.

Configure the URL, username, and password to all your Wordpress blogs an you're ready to go (just make sure you have XML-RPC remote publishing enabled).

Click the icon in your Firefox status bar to display SGW's menu and choose what to capture and where to send it. You can save locally, copy to the clipboard, or post directly to Wordpress.

If you're blogging a capture, you can enter a title, tags, body text, and even set your new post to publish - if you don't check the box, the post defaults to draft status. After successfully uploading, you're taken directly to the Wordpress edit page to put the finishing touches on your new post.

With less than 600 downloads to date, this one is a bit of a diamond in the rough. It's a tremendous timesaver for anyone blogging about items discovered while browsing with Firefox.

I can't always get to my main laptop when I feel like putting together a blog post. If you've read some of my other lists, you probably noticed that I'm a big fan of portable applications for just this reason. As long as I've got my trusty USB flash drive, I'm always equipped with the programs I need to get things done.

Here are ten of my favorites (plus two alternatives). With these programs in my pocket, I'm always able to write when inspiration strikes - regardless of what computer I'm using.

1. Windows Live Writer is the best offline tool for composing blog posts, hands down. While Microsoft doesn't offer a portable version, it's a simple DIY project (Brad first covered it in September 2007). You can download the portable launcher from Scott Kingery's blog: it's over a year old, but it works just fine with the latest beta of Live Writer. With a rich feature set and support for Wordpress, TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogger, and more, it's a necessity.

2. Portable Firefox and SRWare Iron are both great browsers. I keep Firefox handy in case I need access to my favorite extensions, and use Iron when I just need to do some quick surfing. Why Iron instead of Chrome? For the added privacy.

3. GreatNews is a decent, portable RSS reader that's actually portable (no Java runtime needed, like RSSOwl). The download is under 1mb, and it formats feeds into a tidy newspaper-like layout. If I'm using a machine where I'd rather not log in to my Google account, I'll fire up GreatNews to read my feeds instead.

Blog comment company Disqus was built around one pretty simple idea: the comment systems on most blogs stink. Disqus offers advanced comment features for Blogger, TypePad, Moveable Type, WordPress and other platforms. Features like avatar support, threaded comments, and the ability to rank other users comments. The biggest difference between Disqus and the default comment systems on most blogs is that once you register with Disqus you can leave comments on any blog that uses the system without registering over again. And you can track your comment history across all of those blogs, or see comment history for other users.

But Disqus has faced a few challenges. When the service first launched, comments were not indexed by search engines. Or rather they were, but the search engine would find them on the Disqus web site, not yours. So while Disqus was adding value to your readers, you it could actually be taking some value away from your site in terms of search engine traffic. That issue was fixed in August and Disqus comments are now properly indexed by search engines.

Second, Disqus couldn't handle trackbacks properly at launch. Eventually the the developers did roll out a trackback feature. But in order for trackbacks to show up on your site, anyone linking to a post had to use a special Disqus URL, not the URL of your post. Last night, Disqus rolled out a fix for WordPress, allowing Disqus to display all the trackbacks or pingbacks to your blog.

With this latest update, I can't think of many down sides to using Disqus at this point. At least for WordPress users. But there's the rub: WordPress 2.7 will likely have many of these same features built into the platform. No third party plugin necessary. Last month Automattic, the company that develops WordPress purchased Intense Debate, a company that competes with Disqus. And if you can give readers threaded comments, commentor rankings, the ability to register once and post on many blogs without installing a third party plugin like Disqus, why would you? It'll be interesting to see how Disqus works to differentiate itself from Intense Debate once WordPress 2.7 is released.

While talking about blogging commandments makes for good headlines, in this case we're not kidding. The Times Online is reporting that church leaders for the Evangelical Alliance have drawn up ten blogging commandments, meant to mimic the ten commandments that were delivered to Moses by God at the top of Mount Sinai.

At a conference held in Great Britain titled simply "Godblogs", the commandments were put together and then apparently "engraved on cyberspace tablets", whatever that means.

Each of the commandments takes its inspiration from the real ten commandments:

1. You shall not put your blog before your integrity
2. You shall not make an idol of your blog
3. You shall not misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin
4. Remember the Sabbath day by taking one day off a week from your blog
5. Honour your fellow-bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes
6. You shall not murder someone else's honour, reputation or feelings
7. You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind
8. You shall not steal another person's content
9. You shall not give false testimony against your fellow-blogger
10. You shall not covet your neighbour's blog ranking. Be content with your own content

We'd like to hear your thoughts: is this a valuable set of rules of thumb, or even commandments to live by, or is it just sort of a cute but gimmicky stunt? Also, I think they really missed the opportunity to make linkbaiting a sin; what blogging commandments do you think they missed? Sound off in the comments.

[via digg]