Whether a given blogger takes pride in being a weirdo or feels safer as part of a crowd, a new report will help him (or her) sort out exactly where he (or she) stands.  Pingdom staffers took a close look at which platforms are most common among the most popular blogs.

Integrating polls into your WordPress blog just got easier. WordPress creators Automattic have acquired poll and survey service PollDaddy.

Lately, we’ve been seeing blog platforms making moves to become more social. Movable Type started incorporating the ability to set up social networks apart from the Facebook Connect plugin that is available. Blogger discussed adding new features including integrating Google Friend Connect into it.

 This is an event I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while – WordCamp UK 2008, the first WordCamp in the UK, takes places in Birmingham during this weekend July 19-20.

If you’re a WordPress user in the UK and are keen to get involved with others to share tips and experiences about blogging with WordPress, take note that a WordCamp is coming to the UK.

If you’re willing to trust Matt Mullenweg, and believe WordPress is fairly representative of blog platforms everywhere, then have we got a statistic for you: it seems that at least 30 percent of all blogs may be spam.

Owners of new Blogspot or WordPress sites may worry that Google won’t index them.  And we can’t guarantee that Google will do so quickly, or even that the search giant will do so at all.  There’s a fair amount of evidence suggesting that things will be taken care of sooner rather than later, however.

I guess that could be the case if you’re not very serious about your blog. However, if you truly possess the passion to even take the time to blog, you’re going to want to make the most of it.

It seems Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and team have gotten the Twitter bug. In fact, they love the idea of micro-updates so much, they’ve launched a new WordPress theme that lets you create your own blog version of Twitter.

They’ve named it Prologue.

Here’s how it looks:

The popular blogging platform drew a sizable investment from The New York Times Company, which expanded its minority stake in WordPress parent Automattic.

BidVertiser has recently added the ability to integrate its services with FeedBurner, Blogger and WordPress:

Storage space at WordPress.com became more plentiful after Matt Mullenweg announced a big increase for free accounts to 3GB.

There are a lot of data points that can be meaningful for tracking blog effectiveness.

That is, tracking what happens when visitors arrive at and engage with your blog content. It really comes down to the purpose of your blog. Metrics for a blog that’s focused on making a web site more search engine friendly by adding crawlable content and attracting links is quite different than a blog that’s meant to build thought leadership or brand credibility.

Here are some numbers about blogging and social networking sites according to Nielsen Online. They just released November’s numbers on the top 10 social networking sites. The biggest gainers are Flixster (where you share movie reviews) and LinkedIn, a social network for professionals.

Since we are winding down the year of 2007, I thought it would be appropriate to put together what I thought are the top 10 blog posts about Sphinn that have been written in 2007.