During the early hours of the morning, Jon Burke, of Automattic made an announcement which looks to help certain WordPress users monetize from their blogs. The program is called WordAds, and is being implemented through a partnership with Federated Media. …

WordPress has launched “follow” buttons for WordPress.com blogs, which it says will drive more traffic to your blog. Scott Berkun of WordPress says the button will “dramatically help pageviews and retention.” Anyone that is not logged into WordPress.com can visit …

Bloggers that operate WordPress.com blogs can now see who’s commenting the most on their blog and what posts they’re commenting on by looking at Site Stats. There’s a new comments panel that provides tabs for top commenters, most commented and …

WordPress 3.2 recently launched with hopes of bringing a “faster and lighter” approach to the publishing platform. This release marks the 15th major release of the open source platform and comes just 4 months after the launch of WordPress 3.1.

Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg announced today that their servers have been hacked, and source code compromised. Specifically, Automattic had a “low-level (root) break-in” to several servers. He said that “potentially anything on those servers could have been revealed.” …

WordPress announced today that it has been working with Onswipe on a new WordPress plugin that makes sites more iPad-friendly or in their words, “reimagined for a touch experience”. OnSwipe is a platform that helps publishers make their content more …

Here we go again with another one of those silly social media vs. blogs debates. The New York Times stirred the pot this time with an article called, "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter."

Can you imagine ever reading only social media updates and no blogs? Share your thoughts.

Last week, Facebook launched a new registration tool for site owners. With this, users can quickly sign up for new sites with their Facebook profiles. The tool goes beyond the simple log-in feature of Facebook Connect, and lets users more easily fill out forms based on the information that they’ve already shared with Facebook (such as email address, name, birthday, phone number, etc.)

Wordpress has announced the launch of WordPress.com Text Messaging. Users can text 77377 (PRESS) to manage their blogs using SMS messages.

There are free features as well as upgrade features available. For free, users can receive text notifications when users are added or removed, when the theme changes, and/or when the privacy settings change. 

Internet Explorer 9 (beta) was launched to the public this week, and it’s gotten a lot of buzz and high marks. It’s also gotten a lot of web properties doing things to utilize its features. Microsoft’s own Bing features are certainly interesting. 

There’s been a lot going on in web news over the last few days, and there have been some things worth looking at that I haven’t gotten a chance to cover, but I’d like to point out just in case you missed them. 

IBM has partnered with the Industrial Design Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay on mobile web research. The initiative will focus on development of new designs of mobile device interfaces that can be used by people who are semiliterate or illiterate, as well as individuals who have limited or no access to information technology.

Wordpress has just introduced a new feature that lets you update your blog by calling a phone number speaking. Wordpress users can go to the My Blogs tab, enable "Post by Voice" and get a special phone number to call for their blogs.

Calling the number and recording a message will post an audio file to the blog, which can then be published to Facebook, Twitter, etc. with the Publicize feature.

Wordpress has announced the launch of Wordpress for Android (1.0). It is currently available in the Android Market. A lot of what we do on the web is now done from mobile devices, so it only makes sense that this would include blog management.

While it may not be the most convenient way to write a new post, users may find it particularly helpful for at least keeping up with comments and responding. The following clip shows what it can do:

Google has developed a plug-in for WordPress that adds the social features of Google Friend Connect to WordPress blogs. The plug-in allows visitors to these blogs to authenticate using any OpenID account, including Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on posts without having to register. When a visitor authenticates, it creates a WordPress account.

WordPress has launched a couple of new mobile themes for bloggers who use WordPress.com. The themes are designed to display automatically when the blogger’s blog is accessed with a compatible mobile device.

Making moves to get blogs to display properly on mobile devices is a good move considering recent research, which found that consumers are generally not pleased with the way mobile web sites display.

I’ve always maintained that it’s dangerous to take a single Marketing Pilgrim post and assume you understand our sentiment and bias towards any one company. If you read yesterday’s criticism of WordPress, you’d think we were “automattic” haters. 

Today, you’d be eating humble pie.

If you’re a blogger with WordPress.com, you’ll be happy to learn that you now have the capability to shorten your URL’s within Wordpress.com with the new WP.me service. You can see an example of a WP.me link below.

Original
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/shorten/

Shortend Version
http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten

If you want your blog to do better in Google’s search results, Matt Cutts recommends WordPress. According to a presentation Google’s Webspam captain gave at WordCamp San Francisco, Word Press takes care of about 80-90 percent of SEO mechanics.

Don’t be surprised if a lot of blog posts, tweets, and YouTube videos start pouring out of Iraq in the near future.  The U.S. State Department has led a number of corporate representatives to Baghdad, and the group includes executives from Google, Twitter, and Automattic/WordPress.

Running a blog can be a big nuisance; you’ve got keep up with current events, write posts, and monitor comments on at least a daily basis.  But new Pingdom statistics should lighten the load by helping people make sure their blogs remain accessible.