automattic

Search WordPress.com

A new feature on WordPress.com today: Search !

WordPress.com is fast approaching 3 million blogs, with hundreds of thousands of posts and pages being created by our brilliant and attractive users every day. Tags and categories help group the content, but finding exactly what you are looking for can still be tricky. We also feel like you guys are creating some of the best stuff on the web, there’s a natural selection of people tasteful enough to end up on WordPress in the first place. ;) That’s where our new search feature comes in.

Joseph Scott and the team did lots of interesting work – go check it out: http://en.search.wordpress.com/

WordPress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 was released over the weekend ! Super exciting and the feedback has been really positive. Check out the coverage on techmeme, and also be sure to visit WordPress.org which has also undergone a redesign thanks to Matt Thomas.

WordPress 2.5 has many new features including a one-click gallery function that is sure to be a big hit. Matt Mullenweg did a quick screencast showing this feature:
Vodpod videos no longer available.

For full details head over to the announcement post on WordPress.org.

Party

We co-hosted a party Tuesday night in NYC along with The New York Times, Sphere, Hearst Interactive, GigaOM and True Ventures.

The idea was to bring together lots of various media companies, both traditional and new — and talk about tech, web2.0, publishing, and all the great activity happening in our space.

The venue was a perfect symbol of the blending on traditional and new, the recently redesigned Hearst building on 57th & 8th ave, with one of the best views I’ve seen in New York – an unobstructed view of central park.

Big thanks to everyone involved especially Shea Di Donna who as always makes it all happen like magic !

It was great to see lots of familiar face including Jason Schaeffer of CNNMoney, Lindsay Campbell of MobLogic.tv, Jamie Thingelstad of Dow Jones, Adam Embick of Sphere, Kelly Leach of Dow Jones, Jon Friedman of MarketWatch, Andrew Madden of Google, Josh Macht of HBR, Karen Saltser of Real Simple, Scott Kurnit, Jeff Misenti of Fox News, Ken Marcus of CondeNet, Tim Morrison of TIME.com, and Christine Mohan of Dow Jones & allthingsD.

Jason Calcanis was also there and captured some video via his Qik.com mobile hookup, and Jamie Thingelstad and Josh Guttman of Sphere also captured a few photos.

Great event and always fun to be back in New York.

BuddyPress News

One of my favorite WordPress projects out there has been the BuddyPress project – focused on turning WordPress MU into a full fledged social network platform ( more info here ).

Today we announced that Andy Peatling, who created BuddyPress, has joined our Automattic team. In addition, the BuddyPress project will become an Automattic project, much as we’ve done with WordPress, bbPress, Gravatar, and Akismet.

Lots of coverage tracked on techmeme.

New WordPress.com Feature: Prologue

At our Automattic offsite last week, Joseph Scott and Matt Thomas created a very cool new WordPress theme that we plan to use in-house: Prologue.

Inspired by Twitter, you can see it in action in this live demo.  Prologue is also available as an open source theme to use with your self-hosted WordPress blog.

Full details here on the WordPress.com blog plus an early review on Mashable.

My gut tells me we’ll see some really interesting mods with this theme — can’t wait.

UPDATE: Lots of interest already — the announcement post just made the top of techmeme:
prologue

Automattic news

Some very exciting news tonight – we announced a $29.5M series B round of funding.

Our CEO Toni Schneider summarizes it well:

Late last year we sat down to figure out how we’d like to expand our business in 2008 and beyond. Since things are working well, we didn’t want to make any major changes. However, we did set a couple of new goals. One was to put enough money in the bank to have financial security for years to come. Another was to invest more aggressively into our “other” products and services (other than WordPress) like Akismet, Gravatar, and bbPress. Today’s financing will help us achieve both of those goals.

Lots of coverage including: wsj , GigaOM, new york times, ReadWriteWeb, toni, and matt (sporting his new ma.tt domain !).

You can also track the discussion over on techmeme.

WordPress.com now offering 3 gigs of free space

We just announced a very big upgrade on WordPress.com

… everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

TechCrunch weighs in on the news & feel free to digg it 🙂

The Crunchies – watch it live

WordPress and Toni Schneider are nominated for awards at the Crunchies, which will be held tonight in San Francisco.

Seating opens at 6:45 pm and is first come first serve in the balcony. If you have a copy of our eticket, please bring it with you. If you do not have the eticket, no worries, we can check you in by name. Please arrive before 7:30. The ceremony will start at 7:30 and is expected to last until about 9:00 pm.

You can also watch it live here

Update: List of winners, including WordPress & Toni Schneider

WordPress and our Toni Schneider nominated for Crunchies

What are the Crunchies you ask ?

The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.

As they say in Hollywood “it’s an honor to be nominated” – and it’s great to see Toni and WordPress in the mix.

Vote for Toni Schneider as the Best Startup CEO.

And for WordPress in the Most likely to succeed category.