You would think that, almost exactly 4 years after opening up to the public, WordPress.com would have a way for people to subscribe to blogs by e-mail, right? You’d be wrong, at least until today.

While there has always been the possibility to subscribe to blogs by e-mail using FeedBurner or other RSS facilitators, WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic has now added an email subscription feature to the popular free blogging service.

Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as “paragraphs.”

Today, blogs are doing fine, while Twitter is struggling with flattening growth, at least to its Website Twitter.com (clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck have seen no slowdown). The weakness Twitter has been experiencing in the U.S.

Wordpress is one of the web’s most popular blogging platforms, with over 8.5 million downloads and 7,200 plugins. But with all those plugins, finding the high quality ones can be a challenge. That’s where WP Plugins comes in. Launching today, WP Plugins hopes to be the App Store for WordPress plugins.

WordPress plugin developers can upload their premium plugins to WP Plugins and sell them to users. Developers have the choice to sell their plugins at whatever price they choose, and can two choose from two pricing models: they can offer their plugin as-is (buyers will have a 7 day window to download it) or they can offer it as a subscription, which includes upgrades and personal support from the plugin’s developer for as long as you continue the subscription. Of course, the subscription will cost more in most cases. WP Plugins then takes 10% of each plugin sale.

The blogging space is cluttered with lots of options including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, Squarespace, and many more. Today Squarespace is releasing a new blog importing tool that hopes to attract many bloggers over to Squarespace’s blogging engine. Squarespace had originally provided a simple importing tool to its users.

Squarespace’s new blog importing tool supports most of the main publishing platforms; Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Movable Type. After entering your login credentials, the Importer Tool will migrate all of your old blog posts, comments, tags, authors and more to your new Squarespace site. Squarespace is also working directly with Amazon S3 — Squarespace will bring all the media from your old posts and ensure these files are uploaded to Squarespace’s Amazon S3 account. For users who want to retain custom domains, Squarespace will use the URL structure of your existing site and create mappings for every single one of your old posts automatically.

RSSCloud is a new format specification for feeds that solves polling and notification issues. It works by adding a cloud element to a feed which describes the path to a cloud server that should be notified when a feed is updated. The cloud server, in-turn, will send the updated feed content to all subscribers and aggregators. There is a description of this process on the RSSCloud website.

The protocol was designed by Dave Winer, who also drafted the original RSS specification and pioneered the use of feeds as a way to aggregate content. RSSCloud allows feeds to be more responsive and real-time. Rather than a polling model (’are we there yet, are we there yet’), it pushes updates and update notifications down to subscribers via a cloud server and API.

We’re hearing of numerous reports that older versions of WordPress are exposed to security threats. WordPress is one of the largest blogging engines with over 5,317,360 – and counting – downloads for their latest version, 2.8. Many large blogs, including TechCrunch, rely on WordPress to get the news out and post content online.

Writes Lorelle on her WordPress-centric blog:

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I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader. And the TechCrunch feed is probably checked more frequently for updates than most other feeds. In our business, every second counts and RSS just isn’t cutting it.

While there is an argument to be made that RSS is dying, being replaced by more instantaneous forms of content delivery such as Twitter and other real time streams, many people aren’t quite yet ready to give up on it. Instead, they want to save it by speeding it up. Tomorrow, at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, we will see three demos of projects that do just that in slightly different ways.

Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

Yahoo just opened its doors to a bunch of new OpenSocial apps. People who use MyYahoo as a startpage can now add apps from Mint, KaChing, WordPress, and more. The apps include a small view which appear on your MyYahoo page, but can also open up into a canvas view (which is essentially a dedicated page on Yahoo for that particular app). The Mint app, for instance, gives you a dashboard view of your finances and alerts. The WordPress app lets you do a quick post to your blog right from Yahoo. All together, Yahoo added 14 new apps for users to choose from. You can check your meds (Drugs.com), gas prices (GasBuddy), fantasy stock portfolio (kaChing), food and wine pairings (MyRecipes + Snooth), share books (WeRead), or just play Flood-It (LabPixies). You gotta add Flood-It, love that game.

Anil Dash, chief evangelist for blogging software platform Six Apart, announced today that blogging platform has launched a a plugin that provides WordPress users with access to a suite of Six Apart’s add-on features for blogs. Dash made the announcement at WordPress blogger convention WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. While some of Six Apart’s functionality have been available to WordPress users, this is the first time the site is offering these services as a suite to a rival blogging platform. These features include TypePad AntiSpam, a free open source anti-spam service; TypePad Connect, a commenting profile service; integration with Six Apart Media, the site’s advertising network; and inclusion with blog directory Blogs.com.

Dash says that this move represents “baby steps” in Six Apart’s tentative first efforts to provide a suite of features and functionality to WordPress users. This a big deal, considering the long standing rivalry between the two blogging platforms. Last year, the two companies had a heated duel via company blog posts, Twitter and in TechCrunch comments.

BuddyPress, the side project of blogging powerhouse WordPress, has just hit version 1.0 and has officially launched. It’s basically a social layer that you can lay on top of your WordPress (MU — more on that below) blog to give it some of the social network features that you’re already familiar with from larger social networking sites.

Here’s what version 1.0 features: Extended profile, private messaging, friends, groups, “the wire,” activity stream, blog tracking and forums. Yes, that’s a lot of stuff in a first version — and it looks great (see the screenshots below). All of these features should be relatively straightforward from their names, except “the wire,” which is basically like your Wall on Facebook. People can go to that area and leave messages.

We’re still at The Next Web Conference 2009 here in Amsterdam, and I just ran into Matt Mullenweg from Automattic / WordPress and immediately cornered him, put him against a brick wall outside and got him to answer some questions about the company and WordPress.

The takeaways:

- BuddyPress, which is supposed to transform an installation of WordPress MU into some sort of a white-label social networking platform, is going to be launched ‘relatively shortly’. Mullenweg calls it “Facebook-in-a-box”.

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Of the top 100 sites on the Web, which ones grew the fastest in 2008? In a report it is preparing to release tomorrow, The comScore 2008 Digital Year In Review (which you can sign up for here), comScore ranks the 20 fastest-growing Web properties. These are out of the largest 100 sites overall. They are shown below, as measured by growth in unique visitors. (Interestingly, in a separate list of the ten largest sites, only eBay showed a decline from 2007).

Most of the big gains among the fastest growers came because acquisitions (CBS acquiring Cnet, Everyday Health acquiring Revolution Health, JPMorgan Chase acquiring Washington Mutual) or traffic and business partnerships (Break Media, Glam Media, and Everyday Health with Drugstore.com).

If you strip out all of those, which denoted by asterisks, you get the sites that grew organically, including Infospace, Wordpress, Weatherbug, Answers.com Sites, Facebook, Hearst Digital Media, and Mozilla. Here is the full list by rank and annual growth rate (same as the first chart below)

At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well. Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list.

Microsoft isn’t exactly known for championing open source projects. So it’s rather surprising (in a good way) to see the company release something called the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which makes it possible to batch install a set of open source projects on Windows Vista or Server 2008.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired Irish startup Polldaddy for an undisclosed sum. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls (we use PollDaddy here at TechCrunch for many of our posts).

Today at the TechStars demo day, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced that it has acquired enhanced commenting system IntenseDebate for an undisclosed amount.

WordPress has long been in need of an upgraded commenting system, which has led to a number of replacement and augmented systems in the last year, including Disqus and JS-KIT. WordPress CEO Toni Schneider says that better commenting has been on the blogging platform’s roadmap for some time, and that IntenseDebate’s team and technology made the company a good target for acquisition.

WordPress 2.7 will include some of IntenseDebate’s features by default, including threaded commenting. The service will also introduce a plugin that tightly integrates the rest of IntenseDebate’s other features, like aggregated commenting across multiple blogs.

In a blog post announcing the deal, IntenseDebate says that it will now be re-entering private beta, though the service’s current users will still be able to use it. IntenseDebate will stay a separate service that will be tightly integrated in WordPress, but will also be available for other platforms (Akismet’s spam filtering has been used in a similar manner).

IntenseDebate originally launched to the public last October, sporting features including OpenID support, user profiles, and the ability to track a user’s comments across multiple blogs. Since launch the site has seen impressive growth, reporting at least a 25% increase in users each month.

Sometimes the same old restaurants get old and you want to find something new. It’s easy to do some research in big cities with the help of CitySearch and Yelp, and even easier to find websites for larger restaurants like The Cheesecake Factory to help you figure out if the food selection is what you’re looking for. But what about those smaller, family-owned restaurants that get lost in the shuffle because they don’t have a website? Another solution is aimed at them: Letseat.at.

Letseat.at is a free online website builder for the restaurant industry that doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML or code. After registering with the site, restaurant owners can create and maintain their restaurant’s website with the help of a simple admin console. And although all this is possible with other free services like Wordpress or Blogger, what makes letseat.at special is what it does specifically for the restaurant owner.