WordPress.com Suffers Major Outage

Automattic's hosted blogging platform WordPress.com has suffered a major outage today, taking millions of blogs offline. The outage started at around 5:30pm PDT (10:30am AEST) with the main Wordpress.com site stating only that it would be offline for ... continue

Automattic Tries To Cripple WordCamp’s With Restrictive New Guidelines

Just as we thought that Automattic, the company behind WordPress, might finally be softening on its no one can make money from WordPress except us stance, comes news today on an attempt to cripple the thriving "Wordcamp" ... continue

WordPress.com Suffers Major Outage

WordPress.com, the hosted blog service from Automattic has suffered a major outage today, bringing down millions of free blogs, and a number of well known blogs. The outage started at around 1pm US PST (8am AEDT), and at ... continue

Automattic, Those Champions of Open Source Plug The Microsoft Cloud

Automattic, the company behind WordPress and self-proclaimed nazis when it comes to enforcing the strictest interpretation of open source on others, have announced that they're moving WordPress.com to are plugging Microsoft's Azure cloud hosting. At the Microsoft (MSFT) ... continue

A Very WordPress World

Since 2003, an open source, Internet-oriented software package has done what is exceedingly rare within that community:  becoming not only immensely popular and wildly loved, but also profitable.  Matt Mullenweg has managed to turn what began as ... continue

Automattic Acquires After The Deadline. Bloggers Suddenly Learn How To Spell

After The Deadline is a popular spell check plug-in that allows users to incorporate spell checking into their online applications. Now that technology is in the hands of the Automattic team who have just acquired the company ... continue

And then there was three: JS-Kit acquires SezWho

In the biggest shakeup to hit the commenting 2.0 space so far, JS-Kit has announced the acquisition of rival SezWho. The acquisition was made after SezWho was unable to raise a new round needed to continue operations. Under the ... continue

More Hypocrisy from Mullenweg and WordPress with new themes jihad

WordPress has removed over 200 themes from the WordPress theme directory for the crime of the themes linking back to the sites and people that created them. The jihad against themes started last year with Automattic's Matt Mullenweg ... continue

WordPress Developer Acquires PollDaddy

WordPress developer Automattic has acquired online poll service PollDaddy, the company has announced, and has added an integrated poll creation tool for blogs hosted on WordPress.com. A plug-in has also just been launched for externally hosted ... continue

Deals: Voxant, Intense Debate change hands

Two interesting acquisitions related to blogging this week: licensed video provider Voxant has changed hands along with commenting 2.0 service Intense Debate. Voxant offers licensed videos from media outlets, including AP for use on websites. For bloggers the ... continue

Google gets serious about blogging, Automattic the target?

News broke earlier today that Google has acquired Korean blogging outfit TNC, the company behind the TextCube blogging service. TNC founder Chang Kim doesn't disclose the full details of the sale, but speculates that the acquisition may have ... continue

The Next Social Networks Will Not Be Powered By Blog Platforms

Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb today argues that the next social networks will be powered By WordPress and Movable Type. She bases her conclusion on the excellent new release of MovableType that delivers a full social networking solution, ... continue

TypePad AntiSpam Is Welcomed, But Times Are Changing

SixApart has launched a full scale assault on Automattic's Akismet spam service with the launch of TypePad AntiSpam. Michael at TechCrunch notes that TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs ... continue