Today at WordCamp, a User and Developer 1-day conference for the WordPress blogging platform, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed Automattic’s focus on fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses. The theme for the “State of the Word”, Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (their hosted and self-hosted platforms, respectively) sure show it. Here are the stats for WordPress.com over the last year:

• Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
• 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
• 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
• Two million new blogs created for the year
• 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)

This growth is also seems significant versus WordPress.com’s main competitor, Typepad. Comscore numbers put US numbers at 20.9M uniques for WordPress.com against 7.2M on Typepad.com, and internationally 97.8M vs. 16.8M. Here’s the Compete graph (which only measures US traffic):

And for WordPress.org (the self-hosted, open-source version), Mullenweg announced today that there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs in the wild. This figure is based on real data (not sampling), similar to Mozilla accumulating browser stats. Downloads from WordPress.org went over 11 million since last summer (up from 2.8 million the year before), thanks to over 11 new WP releases.

The focus for 2009? Easier upgrades. Their growth, Mullenweg says, is not dissimilar from other popular products (he mentioned Microsoft, OSX, iPhone, Facebook platform as examples), and believes that good platforms need good self-updating systems. Automattic has a three-prong strategy for better updates: better community awareness, working with webhosts, and adding automatic upgrades functionality to WordPress. Mullenweg envisions the upgrade process to work just like Firefox: one-click, with a list of plugin and theme incompatibilities generated. WordPress.org’s plugin directory (and a recently-launched theme directory) will help make this possible. Many new features are also in the pipeline, including the much anticipated BuddyPress, but that a clean update system will remove one of the biggest thorns for WP users.

Also up for 2009 is better security. Their most recent release, 2.6.1, was an optional update (no security patches), which is a nice departure from their previous, critical ‘dot’ releases. WordPress has received a lot of flack for this recently: they were given a 2008 Pwnie for Mass 0wnage for numerous vulnerabilities that led to mass hacking.

Mollom is a new blog spam prevention tool that’s shaping up to be serious competition to Automattic’s Akismet, the current market leader.

Belgium based Mollom was founded earlier this year by Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of the Drupal project and Benjamin Schrauwen, a Post-Doc researcher at Ghent University and Machine Learning expert. Mollom automatically blocks comment form spam, contact form spam and fake user accounts using a filtering technique based on the combination of content analysis and CAPTCHA challenges.

When new content is analyzed by Mollom’s intelligent text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure whether it is ham or spam, it asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge. This challenge-response procedure doesn’t block human users. If an unwanted message still makes it onto a website, users can help fight back by reporting to Mollom. The service learns from its mistakes.

According to statistics from Mollom (they publish a full scorecard here), the service is 99.94% accurate, making 6 mistakes per 10,000 comments, but one key to the service is its ability to learn as it goes along, so the team is aiming to improve those figures over time.

The business model will be similar to Akismet (they’re currently in beta testing only); the basic Mollom service will be free with commercial/ high-traffic websites paying but getting more advanced features, improved reliability and performance. They also plans to offer dedicated, managed Mollom servers for high-end users. Current Mollom users include Sony BMG, Adobe and FastCompany.

Buytaert told me that although offering the same features as the competition, Mollom’s goal goes further than spam-blocking alone.

We want to increase the overall quality of your site’s content. For example, Mollom’s CAPTCHA service already helps block fake user accounts, and we are experimenting with various automated content-quality assessments, including blocking obscene, violent and profane content.

The service is already getting a lot of positive buzz in the Drupal community and the statistics are impressive. They don’t currently have a WordPress version, but they did ask that I mention they’re looking for a WordPress developer to write one, contact details here if you’re interested.

Sweden’s most popular cultural export The Pirate Bay has entered the blog hosting game with new free-speech focused blogging service Baywords.

The service was launched by The Pirate Bay after a friend of one of The Pirate Bay’s founders had his blog deleted by Automattic (WordPress.com) for linking to copyrighted material.

The Pirate Bay team explains:

We’re proud to present a new service – baywords.com. Because of the need of freedom of speech and secure hosting facility of the words being said we could not agree to how people behave towards bloggers.

Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.

The new service is powered by WordPress, and although it doesn’t a full set of features to compete with existing players (like domain redirects) the Pirate Bay team said that they’d add additional features later. Blogs on the service are currently ad free, but will have advertising in the future.

(via TorrentFreak)

WordPress 2.5 has been released with a major overhaul to the interface and a range of new features.

The biggest change is in the appearance of the administration backend, which is described as being a “Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard.” The WordPress dashboard is now widget friendly, and users can include items such as stats, offering similar functionality to MovableType.

Other new features include multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, code friendly WYSIWYG, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and improved search.

A demo video from Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg above, and further details on the WordPress blog here.

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has escalated the war of words against competitor SixApart with a new post that further attacks SixApart following a Twitter exchange Tuesday.

Some highlights from the post:

Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress….

Automattic (and other people) can provide full support for GPL software, which is the single license everything we support is under. Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the “open source” one doesn’t allow any support….

Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!…

Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page…

For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community.

Certainly SixApart’s history in relation to open source and caring about their community isn’t great (and I won’t be one to defend it). However Mullenweg’s comments are interesting given that Automattic’s biggest money earner Akismet is not open source (the service, not the plugin) and benefits from the the failure of WordPress to combat comment spam natively. Couple that with Automattic controlling WordPress as it was its own; some may suggest this a clear conflict of interest that disqualifies Mullenweg from taking the high moral ground. People in glass houses.

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 Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg from going for blood. In a Twitter message, Matt says “six apart is getting desperate, and dirty.” Anil fires back almost immediately with “@photomatt desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”

Last week the two companies dueled in the comments to a post we wrote – See David Recordon (SixApart) and Lloyd Budd (Automattic) comments starting here.

Who’s right? No idea. Dash notes that upgrading Wordpress is not exactly easy. Wordpress CEO Toni Schneider emailed me to say that some bloggers are actually moving from Moveable Type to Wordpress.

What’s clear is that neither platform is perfect, and requires far too much work for the bloggers. They both need to watch out for upcoming next generation platforms, which may eat both their lunches.

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 BuddyPress, ChickSpeak (a social network for college women). He built ChickSpeak (and BuddyPress) on top of a multi-user version of WordPress. He moved all the blog posts off to the side and made most of the real estate a profile page with messaging functionality. Finally, he took advantage of all the open-source plugins available for WordPress:

Wordpress also has an excellent plugin API, as well as a whole host of quality pre-built plugins ready to download and activate. The key here is that I didn’t have to hack the core – I could just achieve the additional functionality needed by building dedicated plugins.

Plugins were built and used for private messaging, advanced profile management, online polls, photo management, multi-blog search and user credential management.

It is easy to dismiss this as completely unnecessary given the abundance of social networks already out there, as well as application development platforms like OpenSocial. But an open-source social network does present some intriguing possibilities. New apps and features could be added simply by creating new plugins. And there would be no lock-in to any proprietary code or development environment. Mullenweg writes:

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.

I asked Mullenweg if the world really needs another social network. His response:

The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards. We invest countless hours giving our data to networks like MySpace, essentially sharecropping on their land for the privilege of being able to connect to our friends. It’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.

I think only an Open Source solution can do that.

Automattic already hosts nearly 2.6 million blogs on Wordpress.com that generate more than 100,000 posts a day. That is a vibrant and big community. Could that be used to seed a social network? Even if BuddyPress remains a completely separate project, it will be interesting to see if it can out-innovate Facebook or MySpace or Bebo as a social networking platform. Does anyone think it has a chance?

Update: Strangely the GNU Public Licensed BuddyPress has had its page taken down by Automattic and replaced with default “coming soon” message with links to the code removed (cache of the original page here). Same with the project page on Google Code, the main page having only just been pulled as the original page is still available to be viewed via Google cache. A subsidiary page with access to the plugin hasn’t been deleted by Automattic yet and is available here. Update 2: The code is back up now. It was taken down temporarily in anticipation of a move to a new URL buddypress.org (not live yet).

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 Twitter, they are offering the template on an open source basis and that if people want to hack it for this purpose, “you’re welcome to.”

The concept of a distributed Twitter has been discussed in certain circles for the better part of the last year. The concept is to decentralize a short message service, therefore overcoming the constant issues Twitter has with service provision, or in simple terms, many people host the service across many servers, and they all talk to one and other.

Allen Stern at Centernetworks says that “With Wordpress the dominant player in blogging, this could be a game changer.” Nah. It’s a reasonable enough idea, but the key to Twitter’s success has been three fold. One is its sheer volume of users that has seen it defeat competitors such as Jaiku by providing the most active and rich user base. Secondly although the centralized service is a weakness, it’s also a strength because when you connect to others on Twitter, you connect to others on Twitter. No working out whether the server they’re on is up-to-date, live or even compatible, it just works (when it’s not down, or “temporarily overloaded”). Third is the open access to Twitter via third party tools; just ask Leah Culver from Pownce (who’s not one of my fans) about why open access is vital in building something like this. Prologue may provide some open access, but its distributed nature will mean that ultimately it will be a niche product; possibly a good niche product, but it’s not going to knock the Twitter bird off its perch any time soon.

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 development of Akismet and WordPress (the downloadable software) but the development of Wordpress.com (its hosted blogging platform), Gravatar (its avatar offering), and BBPress (an upcoming hosted bulletin board product) as well.

Wordpress.com recently boosted its storage cap to 3GB, far surpassing its competitors Blogger and TypePad. WordPress was honored twice at this past week’s Crunchies in the categories of “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Best CEO”.

Last October, Automattic was rumored to have turned down a $200M acquisition offer. The question is: how much did the founders take off the table with this round?

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. The increase is made possible because WordPress uses Amazon’s S3 storage service, and it is passing on increased efficiencies on to its customers.

This is a big deal. Free storage is the new arms race in online services. Blogger and TypePad will have to respond to remain competitive. It also goes to show how Web-scale infrastructure can benefit consumers directly.

(WordPress/Automattic won both the “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Best CEO” categories at the Crunchies on Friday).

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 benefit from improvements to its code contributed by its most ardent users. The competition should be good for bloggers everywhere who choose to host their own blogs (as opposed to those who use hosted services such as Six Apart’s Typepad or Automattic’s hosted version of Wordpress or Google’s Blogger). Six Apart’s Anil Dash, who notes the company’s commitment to openness in general, gives the low-down on how Movable Type took the open-source route. Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) is based on Movable Type 4.0. Dash notes:

—MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes.
—All plugins, themes, templates, designs, and APIs that work with MT4 work with MTOS. MTOS also works with other Six Apart open source technologies such as memcached.
—MTOS is one of the only open source blogging tools with built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs, an unlimited number of authors, and sign-in with OpenID, with no plugins needed.
—We’ll be adding additional paid benefits for people who’ve paid for commercial licenses for Movable Type, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes.
—You can find out how to contribute to the MTOS project and the MT community at movabletype.org.
—Movable Type Open Source is being released under the standard GPL license.
—We welcome and encourage the distribution and reuse of all or part of MTOS in other open source projects.

You can find more details here.

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: take a new round of financing, led by existing investor Polaris, and use most of that new money to cash out the founders.

The size of the round is reported to be as high as $50 million. It’s unclear how much of that goes to the founders, we’re just hearing “most of it.”

The company won’t confirm the deal – Schneider returned my email, saying “Can’t comment on anything at this time.” More as this develops.

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 month. And Comscore says Wordpress.com had nearly 63 million unique worldwide visitors in September 2007, up 66% from May’s 38 million visitors. What I don’t know is the company’s revenue.

Building a real business around open source software is doable – see RedHat’s $4.1 billion market cap as an example. And rumor is that MySQL is planning an IPO of their own in the near future. For Automattic to spurn a $200 million offer means they are thinking along the lines of going public themselves, or at least a significantly higher acquisition price. Down the road, with the benefit of hindsight, we’ll know if they made the right decision or not.

Automattic declined to comment on this post.

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 “classic problems of scale” that Automattic was capable of handling. Effective immediately all Gravatar premium features are now free, and refunds are available to anyone who purchased a premium package in the last 60 days. Gravatar support will now be available to WordPress.com users and will be integrated into all WordPress.com templates.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.