Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Chief Evangelist, took aim at WordPress users in a blog post today. Instead of upgrading to the new version of WordPress, he says, consider moving over to their platform. Now, it’s generally fair game to target your competitors, and Dash’s blog post was so tame that I can’t even find a good quote to pull into this post. But that didn’t stop… → Read More
Can WordPress become the basis of a social network? Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg hinted today on his blog that WordPress might go in a more social direction. He announced a new hire, Andy Peatling, the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project. Peatling describes an earlier version of… → Read More
Automattic has released Prologue, a Twitter style service for groups that is also being pitched as a distributed Twitter. According to Automattic’s founder Matt Mullenweg, the new service is way for users to share short messages with a corporate structure, or with private messaging between different groups. Mullenweg says that although it’s not initially aimed at becoming a distributed… → Read More
As we speculated, Automattic, provider of the WordPress open-source blogging software and spam filter Akismet, has raised $29.5M in a Series B round of financing led by Polaris Ventures (which put in $20 million of the $29.5 million). Other participants in the round include The New York Times, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures. The large injection of capital will not only go towards the… → Read More
In a move that will no doubt put pressure on competing blog platforms TypePad (from Six Apart) and Blogger (from Google), WordPress (from Automattic) is boosting free storage for all the blogs it hosts from 50 MB to 3 GB. Founder Matt Mullenweg notes that is three times as much free space as Blogger currently offers, and that you’d have to pay $300 a year to get as much storage on TypePad. → Read More
Although it’s been long-expected, Six Apart finally transitioned its Movable Type blogging software to an open-source license today. In many ways this is a response to the success of WordPress, the open-source blog-publishing software that is increasingly popular, especially among bloggers who like to tweak their own code. (TechCrunch uses WordPress, for instance). Now, Movable Type can… → Read More
It didn’t make a lot of sense when we heard that Automattic, the company that created the WordPress.com blogging platform and oversees the WordPress.org open source project, turned down a $200 million buyout offer. But apparently the investors weren’t ready to cash in their chips yet, and made CEO Toni Schneider and founder Matt Mullenweg a counter offer they couldn’t refuse… → Read More
Automattic, the company that created the WordPress.com blogging platform and oversees the WordPress.org open source project, has rejected a $200 million acquisition offer, say multiple sources. Half the price was to be paid in cash, half in stock in the buyer. The company, which has raised just $1.1 million in capital, has been on a tear lately. They acquired avatar startup Gravatar earlier this… → Read More
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet, has acquired blog avatar provider Gravatar. Gravatar offers a “globally recognized avatar,” a 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows users from weblog to weblog, appearing beside their name when they comment on gravatar enabled sites. Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg wrote on the Gravatar blog that Gravatar was facing… → Read More
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has spoken out against a number of open source projects for profiteering from their code. The two examples Mullenweg cites are the open source forum platform Vanilla, which recently started including links in their code as a means to cover server and administration costs, and Pligg, which is currently on the market. The post from Mullenweg follows an earlier… → Read More
Automattic, the business end of blogging software WordPress, and enterprise RSS vendor KnowNow have announced a partnership that’s all the talk of the blogosphere. The two companies will offer a joint product that blogs and reads feeds both public facing and behind the fire wall. This is a good move that could make a big difference in the rate of adoption of social software in the business… → Read More
How do you make money by giving away free software? Automattic, the company that’s home to several key developers of the free open source blogging software WordPress (used by this blog and many more) has announced today a new service called the Automattic Support Network. It’s intended help large organizations and enterprise users leverage WordPress and the community around it. → Read More
Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic (WordPress.com, WordPress.org, etc.), gave more details on the funding that founder Matt Mullenweg wrote about yesterday on his blog. No word on the size of the round, but Toni lists the investors: Polaris Ventures (Mike Hirshland), Blacksmith Capital (Phil Black, now at True Ventures), Radar Partners (Doug Mackenzie), and CNET (Shelby Bonnie). Congratulations… → Read More
There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do… → Read More
We’ve switched TechCrunch over to WordPress 2.0. Not everyone is interested in the feature set of the WordPress blogging platform, so I’ll keep this brief. To see a good overview of the new features, see Asymptomatic. A big change is the ability to create categories on the fly, from the post page, with Ajax. This was previously a multi step process. Since Technorati and other blog… → Read More
Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren have launched the Automattic site, which organizes their various WordPress and other projects. Matt Marshall at Silicon Beat has the details. Also, and as predicted by Dave Winer, WordPress.org also announced that they will be integrated into Yahoo hosting in a similar deal as that announced with Six Apart’s Movable Type last week. Jeremy Zawodny has more. → Read More
Matthew Mullenweg announced today that WordPress.com, the hosted (and free) (and extensible) version of WordPress is now available without an invite. I’ve created a test blog, and other than the fact that you cannot set additional ping servers (an advanced feature that only matters to some people), its an awesome product. If you are looking for a free, hosted blog, check it out. → Read More
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