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.

To participate, plugin developers have sign up for a developer account, and upload their plugin. Incsub’s team of WordPress experts will then look over plugin, and once it’s approved, it’ll get put on the store and up for sale. Incsub will monitor plugins and make sure there is no malicious content as well. WP Plugins has more information here.

Incsub has quite the experience with WordPress; they’ve run sites including Edublogs, WordPress Multi-User Dev and blog network hosts Blogs.mu.

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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.

Squarespace’s founder, Anthony Casalena tells us that Squarespace submitted an iPhone application to the App Store two weeks ago, which hasn’t been approved yet and should be coming “soon.” Also, this is the only current way to exit a self-hosted site right now. This importing tool is a big plus for any blogger wanting to move over to Squarespace, because you keep your SEO and page ranks, as well as all your content.

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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.

The new protocol took a big step forward today as Wordpress.com enabled the cloud tag on all post feeds (comment feeds will be enabled at some later point). Winer tweeted about it today, and Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg has since confirmed in an email that all Wordpress.com blog feeds now support the tag. If you view the source of a feed on Wordpress, such as this one, you can see the new tag:

<cloud domain='rsscloud.wordpress.com' port='80' path='/?rsscloud=notify' registerProcedure='' protocol='http-post' />

A cloud notification server is defined for each channel in the feed. This now means that client tools that support the new protocol will be pushed updates whenever there is a new post on a Wordpress.com blog that the user has subscribed to.

This could also mean the beginning of a new format war for the real-time web, reminiscent of the old RSS vs Atom battles. Another groups of developers, lead by Brad Fitzpatrick, published a format and cloud hub known as pubsubhubbub, which is now being supported by Google Reader. There is sure to be much discussion of Wordpress.com falling into the RSSCloud camp, and which protocol/format/method etc. is better than the other (a debate we will engage in on this blog, no doubt).

Services such as Twitter and Friendfeed centralize real-time data and updates. RSSCloud and broader support of such a protocol is a step in the direction of decentralizing such services.

Update: The Wordpress.com blog now has a post about the update

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Writes Lorelle on her WordPress-centric blog:

There are two clues that your WordPress site has been attacked:

First, there are strange additions to permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

To prevent this attack, if you have not done so already, update your WordPress install immediately to the latest version. Change all your passwords to a strong password (cough), including WordPress blog access for all users, database, FTP, control panels, etc. These are all highly recommended procedures.

Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, hasn’t commented on this issue, but we’ll keep everyone updated. In the meantime, we urge you to update your WordPress blog immediately.

Update: We’ve reached out to Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and he mentioned the following. Automattic is not the parent company of WordPress. Automattic contributes to WordPress.org like many other companies do. Mullenweg published a blog post mentioning what steps people should take to ensure their WordPress blog is safe.

(Image via Developer Tutorials)

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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.

Google engineers Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin will show a demo of a new push protocol called pubsubhubbub, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini will demo his similar RSS Instant Update Hub, and WordPress engineer Andy Skelton will show off a Jabber client which uses the XMPP protocol to push blog headlines into an IM-like environment faster than RSS.

The pubsubhubbub and Netvibes technologies create RSS hubs, which push out feeds as soon as they are available. This approach is in contrast to the polling method which is the foundation of RSS. The polling method sucks because it requires the server acting on behalf of the RSS subscriber to constantly ping the server where the RSS feed is published to ask if there is anything new yet. Depending on how often this happens, you end up with a lag. As communications become more real-time, this lag is becoming more noticeable.

The way pubsubhubbub fixes this is by putting an RSS Hub in the middle which more efficiently pushes out the feeds to the servers subscribing to them. It is an open protocol and can be applied to any existing RSS or Atom feed, as well as other real time streams. If you think about the Twitter firehose that everyone wants access to, this approach lets anyone create their own firehose for different types of data streams. It is more of a federated approach. You can think of these RSS Hubs as a content delivery network of sorts for RSS feeds, similar in concept to what Akamai does for video streams.

Netvibes is creating its own proprietary version of this for its own service, which it is developing independently. It is called the RSS Instant Update Hub. All of those widgets on your Netvibes page today take forever to load because they each have to fetch the underlying feeds of data. The Instant Update Hub will cache and push these feeds automatically so that the widgets load faster and they update continuously without requiring a refresh. Any data stream that is supported by a Netvibes widget today, which goes well beyond RSS, will be pushed through the Instant Update Hub. It will also form the basis for a new stream reader which Netvibes will introduce later this year as an alternative to its current widget grid and magazine-style layouts (see screenshot below).

The WordPress Jabber client uses a different push technology, XMPP, to speed up RSS. The effect is that headlines pop up like instant messages. Jabber is mostly used for IM clients such as Gtalk, but Wordpress is using it as a feed reader and micro-blog publisher. The great thing about it is that it is two-way. In the demo, Skelton will show how the Jabber client can be used as an interface to to post directly to your blog. Feed reading and blog posting can all be done from the same place in a more real-time fashion. The Jabber client can also be used as a blog commenting system and embedded as a widget directly into a Web page, turning comments into more of a chat room.

What we are seeing is the world’s of publishing and IM colliding. The faster we can close the loop between publish and response, the more we are going to see real-time data streams take on the look and feel of public IM systems. Twitter is asynchronous, but it often feels immediate with back and forth conversations sometimes happening almost fast as a private IM chats. That is just a taste of things to come, as all publishing platforms get up to speed.

(Photo credit: Flickr/joiseyshowwa)

Here’s the video from PubSubHub’s demo at the Real-Time event:

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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.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com’s 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people’s attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

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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.

The underlying apps will benefit from getting extra exposure on MyYahoo, but it won’t drive much traffic to their sites. People who want to go deeper into the apps will simply open up a canvas page, much like they do on Facebook. But that is okay, because it shouldn’t really matter where your users interact with your service. For Yahoo, this is yet another step in its effort to be the starting point on the Web for its users. The nice thing about the OpenSocial apps is that users don’t have to leave Yahoo to engage with them. So it is really Yahoo’s way of remaining a destination site and keeping its users within its walls, even if they are using non-Yahoo services. Today, Yahoo is also bringing some new add-ons into Yahoo! Mail, including PayPal and Picnik. And Yahoo! TV (which is built into some Samsung and LG TVs) now lets you watch YouTube videos.

The apps are built on top of the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). The canvas views at least support OpenSocial, but app developers still have to tweak the apps to make them Yahoo-friendly. For instance, the “small view” (i.e. the widgets which actually appear on the MyYahoo page) must be developed using “Yahoo! Markup Language” (YML), which is an extension of HTML with more bells and whistles. Yahoo is trying to bring together YML and the OpenSocial Markup Language (OSML), but right now they are forked. But turning an OpenSocial app into one that works inside Yahoo is getting easier. Yahoo joined OpenSocial last year. No word yet on when MyYahoo will start supporting Facebook apps. Oh right, cause that’s never gonna happen.

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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.

Perhaps this integration between the Six Apart and WordPress will help settle the peace between the competitors. And perhaps this is a strategic move on Six Apart’s side to integrate with WordPress, a widely popular platform in the blogging world. One thing is for certain— it’s a blessing for many WordPress bloggers, who will now be able to use the plugin to access some of the useful features of SixApart without having to switch platforms. WordPress offers its own free and paid features for bloggers including a stats system and the commenting and spam technology Akismet (which TechCrunch uses).

Here’s a video clip of Dash talking about WordPress plug-ins and blogging:

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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.

And slated for release in 2009 are yet more features, including: Status updates and photo albums. Sound familiar?

While WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is quick to point out that BuddyPress is not meant to be yet another stand-alone social network in your life, his post about it seems to poke directly at the larger networks like Facebook and MySpace. “I mean all your friends are already on Myspace, but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use. Maybe even someday you’ll be able to connect your BuddyPresses to each other and to the existing monolithic social networks,” Mullenweg writes.

That reads a lot like, “hey a lot of people are pissed off by the big social networks terms of service issues, and their set ways of thinking, why not use BuddyPress?” And depending on how well this impressive feature set works, some people just might. It’s also worth noting that in an interview he did with us a couple weeks ago, Mullenweg described BuddyPress as “Facebook-in-a-box.”

But there’s also a catch to BuddyPress for the time being: To install it, you have to be using WordPress MU, the multiple-user variety of the blogging software that is a bit more complicated to set up and is used much less than traditional WordPress. But Mullenweg’s comment that BuddyPress “currently requires” WordPress MU, would seem to indicate that eventually it will roll out to the larger WordPress community as well.

BuddyPress has been in development for over a year, and was originally called “ChickSpeak.” This name is much better.

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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”.

- The latest version of WordPress (version 2.7.1) is seeing about 27,000 downloads a day (the built-in auto updater helps a lot, apparently).

- WordPress.com saw 175,000+ new blog posts from a little under 200,000 bloggers in the last 24 hours (translated to about 44.5 million words) alone. A quick look at the site’s comScore stats pegs monthly uniques to have reached 24.4 million U.S. visitors last month, compared to 48.3 million for Blogger and 13.3 million for Six Apart services. For reference, Facebook’s March traffic was at 61.2 million unique visitors.

- Real-time status updating is not threatening regular blogging, according to Mullenweg. When asked if Twitter is sucking the life out of blogging, he responded that blogging is not slowing down and that the service is actually quite complimentary with WordPress.

- Automattic acquired 3 companies last year (IntenseDebate, PollDaddy and BuddyPress) and is definitely considering doing more of that. Mullenweg says “it’s fun” but that he’s not planning on making any announcements shortly because he’s still waiting for the prices to go down.

Here’s the full interview:

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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 in the chart above, 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). [Correction: Because of a mistake in our draft copy of comScore's report, we originally characterized Drugstore.com as having been acquired by Everyday Health. Drugstore.com is simply part of Everyday Health's ad network, and thus counts towards its total audience size, but is a separate entity].

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.

During 2008, comScore estimates that 4.5 trillion display ads were served in the U.S. alone. That comes out to more than 2,000 Internet ads per month per person. And, believe it or not, the number of ads served up actually declined a little during the year as publishers tried to push up CPMs (the amount they can charge per thousand ad impressions) by reducing inventory.

Above are the top ten publishers of display advertising as of November, 2008, along with how many billions of ad impressions each one served up in that month. Only two of the fastest-growing sites also made the list of top ten publishers of display advertising: Facebook (No. 4) and Glam Media (No. 9).

Now if we could only get the average CPM per site, then we could create a more interesting ranking of the sites that make the most money from their ads.

Here are the full lists of fastest growing sites by rank and annual growth rate (same as the charts above) and top ten display ad publishers:

Fastest-Growing Sites
1. Break Media* (+279%)
2. Glam Media* (+144%)
3. Infospace Network (+134%)
4. NetShelter Technology* (+131%)
5. Everyday Health* (+121%)
6. CBS Corporation* (+111%)
7. WildTangent Network* (+74%)
8. Discovery Digital Media (+68%)
9. WordPress (+64%)
10. Demand Media* (+59%)
11. Weatherbug Property (+59%)
12. Answers.com Sites (+58%)
13. Facebook (+57%)
14. Yellow Book Network* (+51%)
15. Ask Network* (+48%)
16. AT&T Interactive Network* (+47%)
17. JPMorgan Chase Property* (+45%)
18. Hearst Digital Media (+42%)
19. The Mozilla Organization (+40%)
20. Sprint Nextel (+36%)

Top-Ten Display Ad Publishers
1. Yahoo Sites (37.1 billion)
2. Fox Interactive Media (34.9 billion)
3. AOL (18.2 billion)
4. Facebook (13.7 billion)
5. Microsoft Sites (13.4 billion)
6. Google Sites (4.1 billion)
7. eBay (2.7 billion)
8. Viacom Digital (2.2 billion)
9. Glam Media (2.1 billion)
10. United Online (1.8 billion)

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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.

I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.

As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Animoto

Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.

Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.

Digg

Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Facebook

I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.

Gmail

I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.

Google Reader

Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.

Hulu

Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.

iPhone 3G

The first gadget I’ve included over the years – the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.

MySpace Music

MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.

Pandora

Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.

Scribd & Docstoc

We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.

TechMeme

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.

Wordpress

We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Yammer

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

YouTube

YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger), Ghost Hack Beauty, Mario Bruggemann

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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. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). Note on this list the stubborn persistence of Yahoo’s Geocities at No. 6, the rise of Yahoo’s Flickr at No. 7, Six Apart at No. 10, and the presences of Chinese sites like Baidu Space and 56.com. The real surprise, though, is document-sharing site Scribd at No. 16, with nearly 24 million worldwide uniques.

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Here’s a screenshot of the actual data (as you can see, I rounded above):

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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.

These projects include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress. As InfoWorld points out, Microsoft itself isn’t technically the distributor of these projects since users are merely obtaining them from third party developers through Microsoft’s new installer.

The platform is capable of running both ASP and PHP-based applications, and it consists of a suite of tools including Visual Web Developer for creating websites, Microsoft SQL Server for administering databases, and IIS7 for serving webpages. As such, the bundling of these open source packages is a rather clever way for Microsoft to promote the use of its proprietary server software over popular open source alternatives such as Apache and MySQL. Ironic, yes, but selective promotion of open source is better than none at all.

[News via Dries Buytaert]

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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).

There appears to be a plugin rollup strategy of sorts underway at the highly decentralized blogging startup, one that will result in the absorption of features into the WordPress codebase that are currently provided through extensions. Automattic recently purchased Intense Debate, a small TechStars startup working on an advanced commenting platform. Further back, it also acquired Buddy Press, a project for layering social networking features onto WordPress, in March and Gravatar, a universal avatar system, last Fall.

Like Intense Debate, Polldaddy doesn’t offer its technology to WordPress publishers alone – and it doesn’t plan to phase out its support for other platforms post-acquisition. But we can expect both companies’ efforts to be driven primarily towards improving WordPress – both the open source version offered at WordPress.org, but even more importantly the hosted version at WordPress.com (with which Automattic can actually make money). PollDaddy has already been baked into WordPress.com for its 4.4 million bloggers.

Given the economic concerns that many startups (domestic and global) have in these volatile times, I’m sure that both PollDaddy and Intense Debate are happy to have found a home within a larger and better funded startup. The fact that PollDaddy is based in Ireland shouldn’t have much impact on Automattic’s corporate structure. As CEO Toni Schneider explained at a recent Startup2Startup event, Automattic has no central office and all its employees work remotely from home, only to meet up a couple times per year as a company.

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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.

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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?Now there is a solution for 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.

Aside from the ability to customize the page to their liking, restaurant owners can use Letseat.at to generate printable coupons, upload menus that can be tied to an RSS feed giving daily specials, and choose from a few dozen website themes to get the site up and running as quickly as possible.

Each restaurant website is parked on Letseat.at’s servers and can be accessed by surfing to Letseat.at/Restaurantname.

The main issue facing Letseat.at is the stiff competition. The space is rife with review services like CitySearch, Yelp, and Kudzu, which let users tell others about their experiences at various restaurants in the area, and sites like menupages.com and crazymenu.com make it easy for patrons to find restaurant menus regardless of website availability. As if that’s not enough competition, restaurants can still make their own websites for free with help from Wordpress and Blogger (to name just a few) and it’ll be difficult for Letseat.at to gain traction unless it can gain access to those restaurant owners who want an online presence in the cheapest and quickest way possible.

Rather than simply allow restaurants to build one-off sites, Letseat.at eventually should also offer hungry consumers a single place to search across all of the restaurant sites on its platform.

Letseat.at is currently in public beta and is its doors are open for restaurant owners to try out the site.

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The problem has gotten so bad that Turkish blogs are now banning themselves in protest. The fake bans started with Firat Yildiz, who put this message up on his blog:

Bu siteye erişim kendi kararıyla engellenmiştir

which roughly translates to:

The access to this web site is prevented by its owner’s free will.

Then another Turkish blogger, Selim Yoruk, created this page with a piece of code that lets any blogger easily add the same message to his homepage. Nearly 200 Turkish blogs have (temporarily) shut themselves down in this manner. The point is to show Turkish Web surfers what the Internet would look like if the censorship continues unabated. The protest will last until Wednesday.

(Photo by John Walker).

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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.

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Forgive us while we navel-gaze for a minute, but we were particularly pleased to learn that a mobile app for WordPress will debut in the iPhone store soon. The app will work with both Wordpress.com blogs and on-premise installations of version 2.5.1 and newer. Its announcement comes just over a month after competitor TypePad showcased its iPhone app onstage at the WWDC keynote (you can download it here).

Blogging through Safari is practically impossible on the iPhone due to the excessive real estate taken up by the keyboard. As the demo below shows, native apps have the potential to make the whole ordeal much more manageable, and they could spawn a new trend of bloggers who post while on the road.

Publishers will now have the option to expound on their thoughts while on scene. Before they often resorted to summarizing them in 140-character tweets, or broadcasting them through services like Qik and Flixwagon. The ability to insert photos into posts directly from phone-based cameras will also come in handy.

Perhaps the greatest effect of these apps will be to encourage spontaneous coverage, since most bloggers equip themselves with laptops and EVDO cards when attending planned events. In any case, check out the WordPress demo above and prepare yourself for an even greater frequency of spelling errors in the posts we churn out.

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Due to its popularity as a blogging platform, Wordpress has become a prime target for hackers looking to take over blogs for search-engine optimization (SEO) of other sites they control, traffic-redirection and other purposes. Recently there have been a spate of automated attacks which take advantage of recently discovered security vulnerabilities in Wordpress.

To date, Wordpress has been keeping up with the security holes by releasing updates within a few days of new exploits being found, but in the past few days new exploits have appeared that nobody seems to have answers for.

One such attack actually happened to me back in January, when I noticed that a blog I was hosting had been littered with tens of thousands of pages relating to pharmaceuticals and adult material. Someone had gotten access to the blog and literally created new pages, such as this one:

The blog was running the most recent version of Wordpress available at the time, and I traced the entry-point back to a simple flaw in a script that was not adequately filtering user input. To its credit, Wordpress released a new version that patched the vulnerability (among others) and asked its users to upgrade.

That was six months ago, but in May it happened again, this time with a new security hole and again it occurred a few days before Wordpress was able to respond with an update. The problem is that most blog owners aren’t aware of the threat posed by hackers targeting blogs, as a successful attack may not tip off the blog owner in any way. The security vulnerabilities in Wordpress have led to automated attacks across a very large number of blogs, often without site owners realizing what is happening.

If you are currently not running the latest version of Wordpress then there is a very high chance that your site has already been compromised.

The common results of a successful attack are that a backdoor is installed (meaning the hacker can go back in and enter your blog at a later date), passwords for all users are downloaded, or spam pages are generated. At that point, you are no longer in complete control of your blog, including all the content and anything else in the same database that the Wordpress install has access to.

Hackers are taking advantage of the open-source nature of the software to analyze the source code and test it for potential vulnerabilities. It is then left up to developers and users to detect, track down, and then close off the vulnerabilities in the code that attackers are using. The pattern seems to be that when a new hole is found, it is broadly exploited, then developers rush out a patch and a new release. Thankfully most of the damage inflicted by the automated exploits can be reversed with an upgrade, though in some cases you can be left with thousands of pages and images to clean up (and they are usually well hidden).

For users of Wordpress, backups are essential, as are frequent updates, monitoring your blog usage and tracking the official Wordpress blog and other blogs for news of any new security holes. There are also plenty of guides and applications available that can assist a site owner in further securing their blog.

It is unknown just how many Wordpress blogs are infected (I have seen instances of double infection, where a previously hacked host had been hacked again), but as an indicator, across the ten or more Wordpress blogs that TechCrunch and I have access to, we can see over 100 requests daily for these various security holes. Stories about hacked blogs are becoming more and more and the ongoing concern is that the newest security hole could be found and exploited at any moment.

Update: In the comments, Anil Dash from Six Apart has linked to a post on their blog about MovableType vs Wordpress in terms of security.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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