In this three-part video interview Jessie McKenna discusses their vision of becoming a community hub and services, which range from a full music practice music and art studio to hypnotherapy workshops. She also discusses how they built their online community using Ning. Much of their equipment was donated by community members, such as a Rhodes keyboard from Day Moon Press across the street.

***ROCKiTspace is also sponsoring a Beacon Rocks! live music summer concert series next to the new (beautiful) Beacon Hill Light Rail Station.

What is ROCKiTspace?

Building an Online Community with Ning

Tour of ROCKiTspace

Today wersquo;ve turned on PuSH support for the more than 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. Therersquo;s nothing to configure, itrsquo;s working right now behind the scenes to help others keep up to date with your posts.

For those using the WordPress.org software we are releasing a new PuSH plugin: PuSHPress. This plugin differs from the current PuSH related plugins by including a built-in hub.

For more PuSH related reading check out the PubSubHubbub project site and Google Group. And if you really want to geek out therersquo;s always the PubSubHubbub Spec

Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we havenrsquo;t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldnrsquo;t serve it.

What wersquo;re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they donrsquo;t affect our other locations.

I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us mdash; the entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.

Wersquo;ve said it before, and wersquo;ll probably say it again: attending a WordCamp is one of the most enjoyable ways to meet other WordPress users and learn new tricks that you can use on your site. There are a handful of WordCamps coming up in the next few months all over the world, including Atlanta, Boston, Toronto, Indonesia, Ireland, Greece, and Japan. For more information about these specific events, you can check out the post at WordPress.org or go to the WordCamp hub. Happiness Engineers from WordPress.com and other Automattic employees are often at WordCamps, so maybe wersquo;ll see you there!

Happy holidays from the WordPress.com Happiness Team! Wersquo;re working hard getting ready for the holidays and sheltering from the snow.

We will be closing support for one week in order to spend time with our families whilst trying not to overcook the turkey, coping with relatives, and staying sane.

Support will be unavailable from 2pm EST on December 24th to 5am EST on January 2nd.

If yoursquo;re stuck, we have some great documentation, videos, and of course the wonderful volunteers over in the forums.

We will, however, be around in the forums as usual in case of any problems or urgent questions. We will also be working on documentation and generally improving WordPress.com support over the break. Stay happy!

Before we get to the stats, I should mention that at the top of my thankful-for list this Thanksgiving was our growing group of Automatticians. These are the folks who bring you the awesome features and improvements that you see here every month.

Last month we launched geolocation for profiles and posts, introduced a new P2, opened up our new translation platform, GlotPress, and launched email subscriptions. We also announced proofreading support in the HTML editor, rolled out some improvements to rssCloud, launched a video contest, and had a Black Friday sale on our upgrades.

Now to the stats:

• 509,048 blogs were created.


• 6,380,052 posts were published.


• 483,127 new users joined.


• 7,245,509 file uploads.


• 4,728 gigabytes of new files.


• 865 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.


• 1,720,604 comments.


• 7,516,584 logins.


• 1,390,120,928 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,491,289,510 on self-hosted blogs (2,881,410,438 total across all WordPress blogs we track).


• 2,385,255 active blogs and 25,596,165 active posts, where “active” means they got a human visitor.


• 1,526,632,774 words.

More stuff:

There were more than 222 million unique visitors to WordPress.com in November, according to Quantcast.

The current top three languages on WordPress.com, excluding English, are Spanish (7.6%), Portuguese (4.6%), and Indonesian (4.5%).

We made speed improvements, UI enhancements, and added video library support to WordPress for BlackBerry.

WordCamp New York had a whopping 700+ attendees. Other WordCamps in November: WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Victoria, and WordCamp Bangkok.

Upcoming WordCamps: WordCamp Peru and WordCamp Orlando.

Earlier this week, we launched a WordPress.com Video Contest all about giving thanks. No matter where on Earth you are, we invited you to submit a 30-second video all about the things that bring you joy. And itrsquo;s still on!

The new deadline for submissions is midnight Pacific time (UTC-8) on December 4, giving you an extra week to show us your awesome vids.

Remember, the winner of the contest wins a Flip Mino HD video camera, plus a one-year subscription to VideoPress!

To submit your entry, just post your video to your blog with the tag ThanksgivingContest09.

As strong believers in open source technology, we were excited when Firefox started supporting the new HTML video tag this past summer. It has the potential to transform the future of online video.

While we are still working on adding full support for video tag, we are happy to announce that we have encoded all of our video inventories in Theora/Ogg format as well as the usual mp4 formats. VideoPress users are now able to access the Ogg file URL from within the Media Library, and the video can be played directly on browsers that  support HTML 5, such as Firefox 3.5 and Chrome. Watch this video in Firefox 3.5.

*You can embed HD-quality videos into your blog using VideoPress.

Sandbox 1.6.1 is now available to all WordPress.com blogs.

Alongside Sandbox 1.6.1 yoursquo;ll also find the older Sandbox versions. Wersquo;ve left them intact. If yoursquo;ve been using them, donrsquo;t worry, they havenrsquo;t changed. However, we do urge you to check out 1.6.1.

Sandbox is a skeleton theme for WordPress. Though you can use it by itself, it’s mainly intended for dressing up with a custom Custom CSS Stylesheet upgrade. Sandbox provides all the HTML markup, with a rich semantic structure, and all sorts of microformats and standards built in. You provide the stylesheet, which controls the appearance: layout, colors, fonts and so forth.

If you’re using an older version of Sandbox and are unsure whether Sandbox 1.6.1 is a good upgrade, or whether Sandbox 1.6.1 will work with your current custom stylesheet, here’s how you can try it out:

1. Visit Appearance/Themes then find Sandbox 1.6.1.


2. Click Preview.


3. If all looks good, activate the theme.

We hope you enjoy this great update to a very powerful and popular theme!

You publish a lot of quality content (trust us, we know). And so we understand that making it easily accessible to your faithful readers is very important for you as a blogger. Sure, our Categories, Tag Cloud, and Archives widgets do their parts, but wersquo;ve come up with an extra little something that you may care to use.

Enter our newest shortcode ndash; [archives].

This little guy will allow you to quickly and easily add a post index to anywhere on your blog (page, post, or text widget). Use the shortcode as is, and it will output a listing of all posts ever published on your blog. But itrsquo;s your show, so you get to decide what and how the shortcode generates your post index using a variety of options. Check out a number of examples of the shortcode being used here.

Ever want to see your weekly archives displayed in a drop-down menu? Now you can. Herersquo;s ours:

Enjoy!

You spend a lot of time creating great content and attracting an audience for your blog. What if you could use that influence to make a positive social impact? Now you can.

Wersquo;ve teamed up with SocialVibe, and now by adding the SocialVibe widget to your blog, you are able to earn donations for the charity of your choice by getting sponsored by a brand that appeals to you.

Each time someone visits your blog and engages with your brand (by rating a video, for example), you’re making a difference. That impact is immediately visible on your badge, i..e., ‘My blog has provided 63 cups of clean water for people in need.’

The money donated comes from your brand, so you and your readers never have to pay a dime.

In addition to earning donations, you’ll also get feedback from your charity about the difference they’re making thanks to you. By clicking the charity logo in the badge, you can find information about your cause and view real-time goal progress.

Setup is easy and only takes a few clicks – just go to Appearance-gt;Widgets in your dashboard, add the SocialVibe widget and pick a cause and a charity. For more details you can find documentation in our support area. If you change your mind about your sponsor or cause, you can easily make adjustments by visiting your widget dashboard.

If you are running a self-hosted WordPress blog, be sure to grab the SocialVibe plugin.

With SocialVibe, our community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world.

Sorry for this being the latest wrap-up ever.

May was a fun month for us. We rolled out a ton of new features: the ability to add YouTube videos and polls to comments, stats in your time zone, the VideoPress upgrade (with HD!), post by email, new stats charts, comment search, improved comment reply by email, and VideoPress.com.

May was also the month for our largest-ever WordCamp San Francisco. Mission Bay Conference Center was a packed house, but (amazingly) everything ran on schedule, and nothing went wrong! A round of applause is due to our sponsors, speakers, and everyone who attended for helping to make WordCamp such a smooth success. Thanks for making it all possible.

For post-event coverage of WordCamp, check out the updated site for WordCamp San Francisco 2009.

And now, the stats for May:

• 387,416 blogs were created.


• 411,704 new users joined.


• 5,504,742 file uploads.


• 3,333 gigabytes of new files.


• 826 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.


• 8,625,931 comments.


• 6,914,546 logins.


• 1,243,177,638 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,207,143,849 on self-hosted blogs (2,450,321,487 total across all WordPress blogs we track).


• 2,105,723 active blogs where ldquo;activerdquo; means they got a human visitor.


• 1,728,890,160 words.

Plus:

There were 12,123 post-by-email posts since the release of that feature on May 12.

Video uploads are on the rise after the release of the VideoPress upgrade: 5,587.

WordCamps in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Milan, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp San Francisco.

WordCamp San Francisco had 739 pre-event registrations (a huge jump from 427 last year), and 789 actual attendees from 32 countries mdash; plus 15 speakers, six sponsors, and lots of volunteers.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brazil, WordCamp Dallas.

Health.com has launched the Ask the Natural Living Experts forum hosted on the new TalkPress VIP service.

Wersquo;ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that wersquo;ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools rarr; Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and wersquo;ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. Wersquo;re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for their help with their Yahoo! Application Platform, and thanks to all of you for the best blogs on the intertubes.

If you need help with either of these new toys (or anything else), please contact our support team.

The geniuses behind Google Maps recently announced Google Wave, which they are calling a “personal communication and collaboration tool”. It is a browser application (HTML 5)  that brings the opportunity to “collate” and evolve emails and traditional documents into a real-time collaborative experience that will integrate instant messaging, wiki (read-write) and social networking components.  You can also easily embed these “wave” conversations on blogs to share the discussion…pretty cool!

BONUS points ndash; Google Waves works on Android mobile devices. I repeathellip;Google Waves works on Android mobile devices. Check out the video below!!! I cannot wait to try out on my G1. Being a huge fan of Gmail and Google Documents, I just signed up for the alpha and am VERY, VERY interested in how a tool like this can be used to streamline business communication and collaboration. HEADS UP teammates and peers out there, get ready for the Mark Wave…coming soon!

They are not only calling it an application but also a platform and protocol. Being open source, Google is looking for the community to try out, see what works and extend it to make it better.

I like this quote about email-

“hellip;email (aka snail mail), which was invented 40 years ago, is still today is the most popular communication tool….but lacks the experience of real-time SMS etc. ”

The tasty new logo

Wersquo;ve been busy lately here at WordPress.com mdash; wersquo;ve had an announcement of a new or updated feature for you every day this week. Today, yoursquo;re getting a two-fer!

Earlier this week, we announced VideoPress, the great new video feature for WordPress.com. Now VideoPress has its own home on the web at VideoPress.com. Wersquo;ve also got a great video introduction created by our company auteur Michael Pick, so be sure to head over and check it out. Wersquo;ll be continuing to add features to VideoPress, including support for WordPress.org users, so stay tuned to VideoPress for all the latest.

P.S. If yoursquo;re a design geek like me, you might be interested to know that the VideoPress logo (as well as all of VideoPress.com) is set in the beautiful Museo family of typefaces, designed by your fellow WordPress.com bloggers at the exljbris Font Foundry (exljbris.wordpress.com).

Since opening up the comment reply via email feature to everyone last month wersquo;ve been continuing to improve it. Here are some of changes that have gone in during the last few weeks:

• Better detection of email auto responders / vacation messages


• Added a reminder to the bottom of comment notification emails about the reply via email feature


• Vastly improved support for non-English character sets


• Fixed a problem that some iPhone users were seeing


• Improved email address parsing for Blackberry users


• Fixed cases where signature blocks werenrsquo;t being properly removed


• Better paragraph formatting when parsing comments

And many little tweaks to deal with the oddities of various email clients. Yoursquo;d be amazed how many email clients have their own little quirky ways of doing things.

For users who donrsquo;t include quoted reply text in your emails I do want to point out that yoursquo;ll need to end your email comment reply with !END on a line by itself. Wersquo;ll detect this in place of quoted reply text and use everything above the !END line as the new comment. This is mentioned on the comment reply via email support page but I wanted to bring specific attention to this to avoid any confusion.

We want to make comment reply via email 100% for every user, so if you have any problems with it at all please contact support. Or, if you just want to hi, thatrsquo;s okay too

You guys are generating an amazing amount of feedback on your blogs. Matt mentioned in the April Wrap-Up that there were 8.6 million comments! Comments are flying in every second of the day.

And have you ever had one of those blog posts that was good, but the real action was in the comments? The blog post is only half the story, itrsquo;s the feedback from everyone else that fills in the rest. To make it easier to find the second half of these stories wersquo;ve added comment search to WordPress.com search.

Select the comments options from the WordPress.com search page and wersquo;ll hunt through the millions of comments that have been added to WordPress.com blogs to find what you are looking for. To reduce the comment inferiority complex you get many of the same features and options as post search: sorting by relevance (the default) or most recent, limit results by blog (like site:gigamom.com) and an easy way to subscribe to new matches via an RSS feed ( the Follow this search via RSS link at the bottom of the sidebar).

Comment search, because it was about time comments got a bit more respect.

If yoursquo;ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. Wersquo;ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

(Though I canrsquo;t guarantee yoursquo;ll see numbers like that).

All the old charts are still available in more or less the same form.  And wersquo;re hoping to explore some of the new possibilities Open Flash Chart has to offer ndash; so keep an eye on your stats.  Like we had to ask.

And in case you missed it: yes, blog stats now work in your time zone.

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at workhellip;? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email wersquo;re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

Maybe yoursquo;re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe yoursquo;ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe yoursquo;re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.

Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.

Now for the fun part ndash; send an email!

You can send email from any email client, whether in a browser, on your desktop, or from your cell phone, and as much formatting will be retained as possible.

Attachments are not left out, and your images will be included and automatically converted into thumbnails.  If you include multiple images theyrsquo;ll be converted into an attractive gallery.  Now you can take photos anywhere and have them appear on your blog in moments.

If yoursquo;ve purchased the Space Upgrade then MP3 attachments will be displayed using our audio player. If yoursquo;ve purchased the VideoPress upgrade then you can also include videos.

There really is no easier way to get media onto your blog.

If this hasnrsquo;t whetted your appetite, herersquo;s a quick run-down of Post by Email features:

• Transcoding of any video files supported by the WordPress video player (mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, and m4v).


• Automatic removal of standard signature blocks, with support for manual removal of other signatures.


• Add your email addresses directly into your address book using downloadable vCards. (You donrsquo;t even need to remember the address!)


• Automatic notification of a published email post.


• Conversion of YouTube URLs into embedded videos.

For advanced users wanting that little bit extra, full control of your post is possible through special shortcodes, with details provided on the Post by Email support page.

Itrsquo;s time to start emailing again!

You may have noticed that videos around here have been getting higher and higher quality.

I donrsquo;t just mean the cool content from WordPress.tv, but the video player and video/audio quality itself.

Wersquo;ve rewritten how videos work here on WordPress.com from the ground-up and taken inspiration from the great products at Vimeo and Smugmug, and are pleased to formally offer our video upgrade to everyone. Herersquo;s a sample of what it can do especially for those sweltering in the heat right now:

With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format wersquo;ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.

Videos can be streamed and embedded here on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.

The video feature was part of the space upgrade previously and for those that helped us test it we have now extended a one-year free video upgrade. We just want to make sure existing video users can continue to use it without any hassle. For new users, the video upgrade costs about 5 bucks a month.

As an added bonus, each video has stats attached to it so you can see how often theyrsquo;re being viewed, and more stats are coming.

If yoursquo;d like to geek out, herersquo;s some technical information about the encoding of videos and such, and the entire VideoPress WordPress video player and transcoder is under the GPL and open to the world.

In the future wersquo;ll be working on giving your viewers more options for streaming and downloading videos, better and more in-depth stats, more player customization, and a way for WordPress.org users to use and embed the new player easier.

In April we introduced Instant Findability, TED video embeds, a springtime theme, a cool new domain, and reply-by-email for comments, now open to all. A pretty busy month, with more awesome features on the way, plus WordCamp San Francisco, on May 30.

If yoursquo;re in town or want a reason to be, be sure to register soon. Wersquo;ve got a great speaker line-up, free WordPress schwag to give away, and, of course, a BBQ lunch.

Here are the stats for April:

• 370,053 blogs were created.


• 401,320 new users joined.


• 5,206,156 file uploads.


• 3,050 gigabytes of new files.


• 775 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.


• 8,691,962 comments.


• 6,991,335 logins.


• 1,162,296,607 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,130,311,791 on self-hosted blogs (2,292,608,398 total across all WordPress blogs we track).


• 1,904,262 active blogs and 19,665,407 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.


• 1,569,961,240 words.

Other cool stuff:

After tallying the community vote, the judges panel (Derek Powazek, Matt Thomas, and myself) selected two winning designs for the I lt;3 Blogging design contest. You can now buy ldquo;Dandy(lion) Bloggingrdquo; by el_square and ldquo;I Love Blogging (and Pixel Art)rdquo; by Robert Podgórski in the Infectious store as vinyl stickers for your laptop, iPod or iPhone. Congrats to the winners and all who submitted their work.

Though we released comment reply via email late in the month (April 23), yoursquo;re already making great use of it. 1,029 replies to comments via email just in the final week.

Video uploads using the WordPress player are on the rise, too: 5,290 in April. If you havenrsquo;t already checked it out, head to WordPress.tv to see what your videos could look like in the WordPress player (and to learn a bit, too). If you like what you see, you can purchase the Space Upgrade to get uploading.

We launched BuddyPress 1.0, a collection of plugins that transform a vanilla WordPress MU install into a social network.

WIRED.com migrated its blogs to WordPress, and Intruders.tv relaunched their channels using WordPress MU.

WordCamp Central was redesigned, and now has an awesome map that displays WordCamps around the world.

There were six WordCamps in April: WordCamp China, WordCamp Hong Kong, WordCamp NOLA, WordCamp Tokyo, WordCamp Nigeria, and WordCamp Reno-Tahoe.

Coming up in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp Milan, and WordCamp San Francisco.

When we sat down at an Austin cafe in 2005 and wrote the stats system, Matt and I had no idea what we were getting into. He created the databases and drew the little smiley face while I wrote the code. We had milk and cookies. It was really cute. We were naïve!

I swear it was Mattrsquo;s idea to store stats data as daily summaries in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is why stats days have always ended at odd hours for non-Greenwichians. But even if I seem blameless, I failed to champion your cause soon enough. It is even more my fault than Mattrsquo;s.

And so today I present a gift. If you have set your blogrsquo;s time zone, your stats reports will honor that setting (in whole hours from -12 to +14). This upgrade is retroactive to the beginning of 2009. It affects all blogs using WordPress.com stats, even self-hosted blogs using the Stats plugin (version 1.4).

The best part is that any time you change your blogrsquo;s time zone, the stats reports change retroactively. This works because now we store data by the hour instead of by the day. Irsquo;ve written lots of new code and Barry is bringing many new systems online to cope with the additional data, and we do it all just to give you stats in your time zone. We really do like you.

Some of you may have noticed wersquo;ve been experimenting with a new feature in comments here on WordPress.com, namely that you can now embed YouTube videos and PollDaddy polls directly in a comment.

Although shortcodes are great and wersquo;ll continue to support and encourage them for comments the simplest possible interface seemed to be just a URL.

The URL is all yoursquo;ll need to include a YouTube video or PollDaddy poll. To try it out copy and paste the permalink for a video or a poll on PollDaddy Answers and put it on its own line in a comment, like enter enter http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1598108/ enter enter. Yoursquo;ll now have a poll embedded in the comment just like this:

View Poll

(By the way, I have a Kindle 2 and itrsquo;s the bestest thing since sliced beer.)

Of course if someone leaves a video or poll you donrsquo;t like itrsquo;s just like them leaving something else you donrsquo;t like, you can always delete it or edit it to remove the offending link.

As you and your audience start to play with this it should spice up comments a bit, and based on your feedback we may expand this to encompass other shortcodes and embeds in the future.

Keep commentinrsquo;.

When you have a question about something what do you do?

A. Ask a friend?

B. Go to the library?

C. Google the answer?

D. Make up an answer? (No!)

E. None of the Above

What about using ChaCha?

Learning ldquo;on demandrdquo; is a hot topic and popular way for finding information today. A peer suggested ChaCha to me yesterday. When I tried it, an answer for  ldquo;death of Napoleonrdquo; came back in less than a minutehellip;rdquo;gastric cancerrdquo; wow that was fast!

In January of 2008, ChaCha launched its mobile answers text service at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Since that day, hundreds of thousands of people have become ChaCha fans - of both the text AND mobile answers voice service - asking ChaCha millions and millions of questions every month.

On September 17th, 2008 ChaCha announced that it now has more than a million users and has answered more than 27 million queries since it launched its revolutionary mobile answers service in January. This, combined with its quarterly growth rate in Q2, makes ChaCha the fastest growing mobile search service, surpassing both Google and Yahoo in both WAP and text-based search growth rates (according to the latest data from Nielsen Mobile).

ChaCha was the fastest growing U.S. mobile text-based search service again for the 2nd quarter in a row surpassing Yahoo and on the heels of Google growing market share from seven percent to 28 percent in only 90 days, according to Nielsen Mobile.

Here is how it works:

Try it two ways:

Call 1.800.2ChaCha (1.800.224.2242)

Text 242242 (spells ChaCha)

1. Simply ask your question from your mobile phone as if you were talking to a smart friend.

2. Wersquo;ll instantly route your question to the most knowledgeable person on that topic in our Guide community.

3. Your answer is then returned to your phone as a text message within a few minutes.