So what does Automattic need the money for? After all, from what I know of the business, Automattic has been bubbling around the break-even point for a while now. Matt explains that they are going to roll out newer, hosted services such as BBPress (forums), and will expand their other product offerings, such as Gravatar and the spam-protection service Akismet. The money will be spent to hire more engineers and build out a more robust infrastructure.

That would be a start. Anne Zelenka made an impassioned case for using WordPress to build a social network, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see some social features start to creep into WordPress.com as well. They just boosted their storage capacity to three gigabytes, which indicates that they are serious about allowing bloggers to add video and other multimedia content to their blogs.

Today we are releasing video uploading to Blogger! This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading.

When you go to the Blogger post editor, you'll see a new button () next to the image uploading one. Just select a video from your computer, wait a few minutes for the upload and processing to occur, and voila! Now when you visit your blog, you will see something like this (of course without Tomo, the Blogger Akita):

Google Australia this morning showed a new iteration of Google Maps, launching about a week from now.

First up, if you know how to embed a YouTube video in your blog, you'll be able to embed Google Maps in your website, Google promises.

It'll be as simple as cutting and pasting a bit of HTML code into your website, just like a YouTube video.

The embedded maps have the full functionality of Google Maps -- they provide satellite view, map view or hybrid view, and users can click and drag the maps around.

To embed a Google Map, you pull up the map you want to embed--it can be a location, a business, series of driving directions, or a My Map you've created--and then click "Link to this page" and copy and paste the HTML into your website or blog. The embedded map will be fully interactive--you can drag and click or zoom in on a location, and view it in map, satellite, and hybrid modes,

1) The biggest news is that there will be a rebranding of MyBlogLog. The exact timing and new brand were not revealed. (YahooBlogLog or MyYahooLog? Time will tell.)
2) A complete site redesign is on the way!
3) A new "Widget 2.0" is coming with some hover features.
4) Yahoo! is hard at work to remove the offensive photos so that MyBlogLog would be palatable to more conservative business blogs.
5) Some sort of method to turn off your presence for some types of sites will be added.

On Fri. May 4th, we updated Technorati.com to include the Technorati Authority for blogs listed on the Blog page and in search results. This update changed the earlier references of "N blogs link here" and "X links from Y blogs" with the single Technorati Authority number. On the blog page, we also show the Technorati Rank.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

Since at the lower end of the scale many blogs will have the same Technorati Authority, they will share the same Technorati Rank.

Blog Top Tags Widget
Display your top tags with the Blog Top Tags widget in a beautiful cloud formation (or the top tags of any blog). Copy the code snippet below, replacing {URL} with your blog URL. Note: when you first install this widget on your blog, it will take us a few minutes to build a custom widget with your blog's top tags, but then after that we'll keep it up to date for you.

View your snipped URLs

Edit your snipped URLs, including their nickname etc

Search through your snipped URLs

View popularity statistics on your own snipped URLs

Are you fed up with having to remember dozens of usernames and password? Does the idea of creating yet another account on yet another site leave you cold?

OpenID is a new standard that hopes to alleviate some of the pain, and we've just made it available to everyone who has a WordPress.com blog. This means you can sign in to a growing number of sites using your existing WordPress.com account.

There are many culprits. First, we have a lot of third party widgets, ads and analytics apps running on the site. They are often the cause for slow load times. FM Publishing, our advertising network, often slows down the site and then other things pile on to crush it.

Today we had three problems. FM is updating their software and caused massive . We switched to the new version of wordpress which is clearly not bug free. And on top of that we have a number of plugins that are acting weird on the new wordpress software. One of them took us down earlier tonight.

Another culprit is MyBlogLog, which we've had to strip off the site a number of times because of slowdowns.

But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the "ue" this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it's a good start on the Unix shell for mashups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be "text entities." You can solicit user input and build URL lines to submit to sites. The drag and drop editor lets you view and construct your pipeline, inspecting the data at each step in the process. And of course, you can view and copy any existing pipes, just like you could with shell scripts and later, web pages.

Creating a new Pipe, however, is not for the wary. The mere volume of available options to both expand and narrow down hundreds (or thousands) of pieces of data, combined with the seemingly endless array of (sometimes rather ambiguous) input boxes for each and every module in the pipe, is likely to be daunting for the novice user. Therefore, the service is not likely to be something that the majority of Yahoo!'s everyday users are going to use, but more likely to attract the early-adopting, slightly more technical crowd.

Because of this, Pipes may take off among tech geeks and have enough meme power to remain in the collective consciousness for a while, but may not be able to become a hit trend anytime soon. Content publishers may also become wary of Pipes altering their relationship with the end user by allowing users to manipulate, reformat, and ultimately alter content as they so please. Mishmashing content from all around the web sounds like fun for the user, but some fear that it could decrease brand awareness and reduce webmasters' abilities to track content usage patterns.

We show a little fire icon next to Top Searches, in case you want to write a blurb about something that's super hot.

Here's how we talk about; hope you love it!

Where's the Fire? What's Hot and Why.

Ever wonder why something is sooooo popular? Or want the whole story without having to dig through a zillion blog posts looking for the hot video or juicy pictures? WTF tells what's hot - and why - and where the good stuff is. Vote for your favorite WTFs to help the community bubble up the best ones. Jump in!

Snap's preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it's useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

That's not to say im any better, but it is true. As a group , most bloggers are only a small step away from the flashing, rotating logos of 1997 or the neon pink backgrounds and blaring teen pop auto play bollocks of your average 17yr old MySpace user -- and I include myself, though i dont use SPA, im as guilty as the next blogger of "bling envy".

Unlike familiar sites such as myspace.com, friendster.com or blog.com, which place intrusive and distracting advertisements on the user's personal blog pages, ShoutPost.com reserves the user's space for the user's content only. Additionally, ShoutPost.com provides a unique syndication system, which enables members to create their blog on ShoutPost.com, and instantly syndicate it on any other website that they have control over. This is the first time that a free-blogging site has offered syndication of this type.

"We wanted to give bloggers a free personal space to share ideas without having to worry about their message being corrupted by the latest DVD release, or the newest network sitcom," said ShoutPost.com creator, Taylor Bayouth. "With the new syndication system, we also offer the first free method for any website owner to easily syndicate their ShoutPost blog anywhere on the web. We think this feature will play a large part in ShoutPost's success."

The wait for Gravatar 2.0 is almost over. The new site will be released in early February with an all new interface and some great new functionality.

When the new site goes live, I'll send a one time email notification to all account holders. If you don't currently have an account, then leave a comment here (with your correct email address) and I will send you the notice as well.

Over the coming weeks I'll be posting screenshots and other tidbits to keep you updated during the final phases of testing and deployment. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you don't miss anything!

Yahoo is not saying what it paid for Mybloglog, but knowledgeable sources said it cost a little over $10 million for the company, which first offered the service in July. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.

"This closes the loop between readers and publishers," he said. "Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It's the power of implicit networking."

Web advertisers, of course, want to know about everybody. Mybloglog is currently available on about 45,000 blogs, according to company chairman Scott Rafer, and has registered the photos and personal information (like the address of their blogs) of about 33,000 readers. Rafer also said it looks at about 1 million readers of blogs a day. Its most popular blogs are, not surprisingly, on technology subjects, but also on real estate – making the user information valuable to multiple advertisers.

After much discussion and heartache we have decided to walk away from the Performancing deal. We listened to our Posties and other Metrics users, dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn't what we were looking for right now.

The decision has been made by Nick at Performancing to make the Metrics platform Open Source and I believe that is a wise decision. Nick is a great guy and I wish him much luck with the other aspects of Performancing.com. Nick did what he could to keep the hosted version of Metrics running, but in the end it just wasn't a fit

Whatever happened, this isn't pretty. After the deal was announced, Performancing moved their non-acquired assets to a new domain name and re-launched that service. They certainly stopped talking to other potential acquirors, given that the deal was officially announced. In merger-land, this is what's known as "being left at the altar" because everyone down the road who you talk to will want to know why the previous deal exploded.

Performancing should have had a more nailed down acquisition agreement, so they aren't entirely blameless.

PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, today announced it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select assets of Performancing LLC, operator of Performancing.com, a popular Internet community site for professional bloggers. Through its purchase PayPerPost gains a number of powerful blogger support tools including Performancing Metrics, the leading, free blog analytics service, and Performancing Exchange, an online "classifieds" for bloggers.

CoComment, the blog comment tracking service that emerged from a Swisscom project, has raised $1.5M from Netage Capital Partners, a Japanese venture fund owned by investment company Netage Group. It acquired a 40 percent stake in the Swiss venture.

Netage has holdings in several RSS projects for the Japanese market, according to its website. It is currently launching CoComment in Japan, said Swisscom in a statement. The Swiss telco also said there had been interest from investors and companies in Europe and the US, but that the Japanese investor brought the "broadest" experience and most "success" in the Internet market to the venture.

Despite buzz to the contrary, MyBlogLog.com is not yet the property of serial acquirer Yahoo Inc. This comes straight from Scott Rafer, the former CEO of search engine Feedster and now CEO of the popular blog community tracker.

"We've got a lot of balls in the air at the moment," Rafer said. Rumors that Yahoo was buying MyBlogLog for $10 million have been floating around the blogosphere since the Web 2.0 "summit" earlier this month. MyBlogLog encourages people to build connections and communities around their favorite blogs.

One of Yahoo's PR firms, OutkastPR, emailed us to say that this story is innacurate, and that Yahoo has not acquired MyBlogLog. We dug a little deeper with some insiders and it appears that Yahoo and MyBlogLog are in very early acquisistion discussions, and nothing more. Founder Scott Rafer was completely silent when asked about the rumors today - suggesting he didn’t mind getting all the press attention.

As a provider of syndicated text, pictures and video news, Reuters plans to offer Pluck's BlogBurst blog syndication service to thousands of its media customers worldwide, the London-based company said.

BlogBurst counts U.S. news outlets such as The Washington Post, the Gannett newspaper chain, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman as its customers. In Britain, it also links bloggers to the Guardian newspaper site and Reuters sites.

Blog categories covered include news, politics, sports, health, fitness, technology, travel, food and entertainment.

Pluck plans to take advantage of Reuters' investment to expand its services worldwide, starting in Europe and later in Asia, executives of both companies said.

Then AOL launched two music blogs in Blogsmith: AOL Music News Blog -- which is better than you'd expect from the name -- and Spinner.com, an older domain reborn as a great indie music news blog. Following that they launched The Fanhouse covering NCAA football and the NFL and an elections blog which features Sam Donaldson's Ask Sam column.

That brings us to November and Blogsmith -- like Weblogs a year before it -- is now owned by AOL.

Obviously AOL likes our enterprise blogging platform, but I think the quality of Blogsmith's versatile team factored into AOL's decision -- maybe even in equal parts. I reclaimed the team members who had been on a "Netscape detour" and we've kicked off some major upgrades. We moved to a multi-city version of the platform. That was both the largest and smoothest server move I've ever been a part of. Right now my team is in Florida without me working on an overhaul of the publishing tools.

Is AOL going to release Blogsmith to the public as a Typepad/WordPress/YouTube/Wal-Mart/Starbucks-killer or not? Yes.

Dave McClure, from the audience, asked why Yahoo hasn't acquired Six Apart's blogging tools or Facebook to gain some faster traction in blogging and social networking. Horowitz responded, "We put Yahoo 360 out there and learned a lot from it. 360 may be doing a 180, and change and adapt to address the opportunities." He didn't offer any specifics as to what the 180 degree turn looks like.

Filo added, "We are absolutely interested in blogging, and we hope five years from now to be a major player in that space. We will look at acquisitions."

Today we're launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes. Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in our Blog Search index can now ping us directly. We'll continue to monitor other pinging services and will contribute change notifications to the community.

I recently interviewed del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, who is now with Yahoo after the popular social bookmarking service was acquired last December. Joshua was recently named as top innovator of the year by MIT Technology Review Magazine. Tagging is one example of an innovation that del.icio.us pioneered (at least in its current form). Joshua told me that "del.icio.us was the first app to showcase tagging" and that now "practically everyone uses tags in the [del.icio.us] system in some form."

But Joshua has bigger plans for del.icio.us - it will essentially turn into a social network, with more focus on people instead of data.

The company seeks to define who is shaping specific conversations in blogs with "algorithms" that analyze relationships, based on four criteria:

overall traffic and number of inbound links

contextual relevance to a customer's specified area of concern, such as key words.

frequency of content publication on such topics

the traffic it sends back to the marketer

This is a very difficult thing to do through automation, because links can often be deceptive. As the hundreds of PhDs at Google have found, it is not easy to deconstruct the masses of "link-farms" between Web sites, purposefully created to boost each other's traffic. We seem to always be one step behind the latest statistics tricks, on traffic numbers too. Rob Crumpler, the company’s chief executive officer, tells us the company has done a lot of work to combat this sort of thing.

WeeWorld is the only online personalized identity provider that enables users to carry their alter-ego with them throughout their online and offline lives. For example, international mobile partnerships such as Motorola and Vodafone enable users to extend their digital identity to cell phone picture messages, caller ID alerts and wallpapers. As the company continues to cultivate strategic partnerships with companies such as Skype, MSN and AOL, WeeWorld is poised to become the standard for online/mobile digital expression and personalization.

In addition to WeeMee portability, WeeWorld.com provides interactive games and personalized ecards to send to friends. Users can create WeeBuddies for their friends, keep their own blog and continually update their own WeeMee to express their current mood or daily attire. WeeWorld also plans to evolve into the broader social networking realm by allowing each WeeMee to create and personalize their own space.

With billions of possible configurations, there is a WeeMee for everyone, as users choose their body shape, skin color, hair style, emotion, clothing, accessories, pets, pastimes, passions, pursuits, sports, backgrounds, moods, emotions and feelings.

Meanwhile, Opinion BuzzTracker - the new blog tracking partnership between FoxNews.com and RealClearPolitics.com - will apparently probe the blogosphere flagging up the most popular politics stories in a given 24 hour period.

The official statement reads: "The tool permits Internet users to easily filter through thousands of political news articles and blog conversations to determine the 'wisdom of the crowds' in a continuously updated format."

According to Opinion BuzzTracker the top three blogs today come from RightWinged.com, Ace of Spades HQ and And Rightly So! - all "points of the political compass" covered there then ...

Want to read the latest gaming news on your Xbox 360 (like Gaming Bits!)? XB Stream is a new application that works with Windows XP/Vista as a RSS/XML news aggregator to show gaming news and play podcasts on your Xbox 360. It takes news feeds (text and images) and converts it to images that are viewable on the Xbox 360's pictures folder or podcasts and places them in your audio folder on the Xbox 360.

In its complaint, the FTC alleged that Xanga, a rival to the popular MySpace.com, allegedly permitted creation of 1.7 million accounts by users who submitted birthdays indicating they were under 13. Collecting personal information from anyone under 13 without parental consent is a violation of the children's protection act, or COPPA, which was passed by Congress in 1998.

According to the FTC, after signing up for the service, children often posted personal information on their blogs.

"Protecting kids' privacy online is a top priority for America's parents, and for the FTC," FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said in a statement. "COPPA requires all commercial Web sites, including operators of social networking sites like Xanga, to give parents notice and obtain their consent before collecting personal information from kids they know are under 13. A million-dollar penalty should make that obligation crystal clear."

"Xanga has long been committed to making its site safer for its members," it said. "When these issues came to our attention, we instituted a stronger, more comprehensive safety and compliance program."

The acquisition gives Six Apart both a feed reader and feed search engine. Rojo will help generate more pageviews, allowing Six Apart to further leverage its newly created advertising network covering LiveJournal Plus accounts and Vox. Six Apart may bundle the Rojo service with its licensed personal blogging service currently powered by TypePad. Six Apart currently licenses TypePad software to companies around the world such as Le Monde in France and Nifty in Japan. Rojo's software could be bundled into these licensing deals or command a higher licensing value for Vox when it is launched and ready for redistribution.

In the case of MySpace, the ability to simply click "add" when you hear a song you like and then you are broadcasting that song on your own page was pure genius. It brought the musicians to MySpace because they saw the viral aspects to music on MySpace. The more musicians came to MySpace, the more value accrued to being a member of the MySpace social network.

The founders of YouTube must have thought a lot about that trick because when they made their video player embeddable on a MySpace page, the MySpace community reacted swiftly, putting YouTube videos on their pages the way they put music on their page. They find something they like and they show it to their friends. Not a link, that's old school, they showcase the media right their on their page.

The biggest change of all is perhaps the least immediately visible, but it affects the entire underlying structure of Blog*Spot. What used to happen was that Blogger would create static HTML files on your Blog*Spot account every time you published, and those files would remain there unchanged until your next update. In the new version, adding a new post simply updates your information in our database. Then, when someone wants to see any of the pages on your blog, those pages are created for them dynamically, on the fly.