Today, you’d be eating humble pie.

Automattic has announced the acquisition of After the Deadline, a service that provides spell checking, style checking, and grammar checking. Huzzah!

While I’m somewhat puzzled that WordPress.com users get After the Deadline baked-in, while us .org user are left once again with just a plugin, I still applaud the acquisition. Why? Because spell checking and grammar checking are the bane of any blogger’s existence!

For example, despite my own best efforts, I’m plagued with the curse of “its” versus “it’s.” It’s not that I don’t know how to use each, it’s that sometimes my fingers move faster than my brain. Judging by a demo offered by After the Deadline, I need to install this plugin ASAP:

(Note: It’s not perfect. Notice it missed “ads” when it should be “adds.”)

You can learn more about the deal via After the Deadline’s founder Raphael Mudge.

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"Now whenever you do a post you’ll be a few clicks away from having your own poll, and you can have as many as you like!" says WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg. "We’re also going to be working on a lot more styles and customization of the polls, so you’ll be able to match it exactly to the look and feel of your blog." PollDaddy contains the following features:

"For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with," says Mulleneg. "I’ve also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users."

There’s no doubt that polls can be a great way to inspire audience participation (or user engagement if you will). They can be great way to come up with interesting statistics (more so for more popular blogs) and get feedback from readers about your blog itself, which can then lead to improvements. Polls make for a nice interactive element that people often just happen to find fun.

With so many of the Blogosphere’s blogs running on WordPress, PollDaddy could potentially have an impact on a great number of them. For a nice demo on how PollDaddy for WordPress works, check out the video below.

 Matt Mullenweg

On BuddyPress.com, a single line of text states, "BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform."  In a post on his blog, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, explain why this idea is of interest to him.

"It’s clear that the future is social," Mullenweg writes.  "Connections are key.  WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier.  Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape."

With the implication being that Automattic and BuddyPress might be the ones to bring the alternative into existence.

We’re not there yet, though, and Mullenweg didn’t say anything further on the matter.  Also left unsaid are BuddyPress’s purchase price and the terms under which its creator, Andy Peatling, agreed to work for Automattic.

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Mullenweg wasn’t self-centered, though; instead, he gave advice that could benefit everyone.  “There’s a million different ways to approach your blog, but you have to find what you love,” Mullenweg advised listeners.  “There’s other people out there like you, and they will find you and love your blog.”

More concrete suggestions included a tip to use Google’s and Technorati’s tools – they may help you get noticed.

Still, not everything’s foolproof.  On the subject of Automattic, Mullenweg was humble enough to state, “Hopefully we will stay alive.”  And assuming survival occurs, he plans to keep the company “as small as possible.”

As for that well-known blogging software, Mullenweg readily admitted that there are “parts of WordPress that suck” (such as its spellchecker).  But in looking to the future, he believes that writing itself is “the soul of WordPress,” and merely wants to see the software used in different ways and on different platforms.

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Prince contributed to this report.

In real world terms, this would be a fairly stunning decision – 5.0 percent simple interest on $200 million would generate $10 million per year, and everyone could live happily ever after without touching the original cash.  But in an eBusiness sense, a refusal of $200 million might not be so crazy; Mark Zuckerberg seems to be doing just fine after turning down much larger amounts.

So where does this leave Automattic, which is the company behind WordPress?  It’s hard to say.  Michael Arrington, who broke the story, did not identify the potential buyer, and no one from Automattic has stepped forward to explain its decision.  Automattic may be holding out for more money from other parties, or counting on its own technology to make $200 million look like a paltry sum.

Fans of Automattic and WordPress feel this was the right decision, though.  Arrington’s article has 42 comments at the moment, and many of them include words like “great,” “rocks,” and “awesome.”

It’ll be interesting to see whether Sun can improve its approach to startups. LAMP is sure getting traction – I’ve stopped asking entrepreneurs what infrastructure they are using since the answer was so consistently LAMP.

Sun has done a great job of stopping the bleeding and getting some interesting new products out (Black Box, for instance) but for Sun to dramatically increase its relevance it needs to convince Steve Jobs to put Java on his new products and needs to build something that really shakes up the Web 2.0 industry.

That’s why I asked Jonathan what Sun’s iPhone was. I notice Jonathan didn’t have a good answer to that question.

Oh, and someone asked why would Steve Jobs put Java on the iPhone? My answer: it’s dramatically easier to write applications for a runtime-compiler system like Java or .NET. Because Steve Jobs refuses to go with Java (putting .NET on iPhone doesn’t make sense for Apple’s business) it means that developers on Apple’s iPhone will need to work a lot harder to get apps out. Translation: fewer apps.

I remember back in 1989 that Apple was six years ahead of the industry with its Macintosh II. Remember, it took until late 1995 until Microsoft was able to match the innovations Apple shipped in 1989.

So, why did Apple only end up with a small sliver of market share? Developers, developers, developers.

Oh, sorry, I’m channelling Steve Ballmer again.

Aside: I’m posting this from the Golden Gate bridge. I love Verizon Wireless!!!

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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They are both produced by Automattic. Recently I sat down with Automattic’s CEO, Toni Schneider, for a 45:33 interview for ScobleShow.

We talk about everything from the future of blogging, to spam detection, to other fun things. If you’re interested in WordPress, you won’t want to miss this one.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

The open source movement provided an opportunity to build a service industry around a freely available product. Firms like Red Hat offered handholding to enterprises who wanted to have someone to yell at should an open source product misbehave.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg’s new business, Automattic, offers professional services related to his projects. Om Malik exclusively reported Schneider will serve as Automattic CEO, along with his participation in the new VC company called True Venture.

Automattic described its business on its website:

WordPress has grown dramatically in its acceptance by bloggers, and even figures in the blogging efforts at the New York Times. Other projects include the WordPress.com hosted-blog site, the Akismet spam protection service, and bbPress forum software.

Schneider hinted on his blog that he may do for Yahoo what Doug Edwards is doing for Google with his Xooglers blog, and offer a peek at Yahoo’s inner workings:

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.