Here at WordPress.com, we always run the most recent version of the WordPress open source software. In addition, we do custom development so that we can offer features not included in the open source core product (like VideoPress, built-in polls, etc.). Because WordPress.com gets new features implemented as they are developed, we donrsquo;t usually talk too much about big version releases. For example, WordPress 2.8 was released recently, but we didnrsquo;t announce it here because WordPress.com blogs had already been running the new features (like the new widgets administration panel) before the big open source release occurred.

The open source project is getting started on development of version 2.9, which is expected to launch toward the end of this year. The reason I think itrsquo;s worth posting about this here on WordPress.com is that the focus of the 2.9 development is going to be improved media features, and improved media management is one of the most frequently requested things in the support forums, support emails, comments and at WordCamps.

There have been many suggestions for how to improve our media functions, so many that we canrsquo;t build all of them at once. For the next couple of days, there is a survey you can take to vote on which media features are the most important to you. This will help us prioritize the development. Are you dying for photo albums? A redesigned uploader? The ability to crop, resize or rotate your images? There are 11 proposed media features listed in the survey for you to rank in order of priority.

Descriptions of each proposed feature are provided at the beginning of the voting survey, so yoursquo;ll be sure to know what each what means. Only the first question (pick your top choice) is mandatory. This survey isnrsquo;t very long. Question two lets you assign a general high/low priority to each of the 11 feature suggestions, while question 3 asks you to rank the 11 features in order of priority from 1-11. A text box or two allow you to make additional suggestions, and thatrsquo;s it. The survey is anonymous, and will be open until Friday, July 10, 2009 at 11:59 PM UTC.

Vote now!

Remember National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) back in November? You all used the opportunity to take a swing at churning out a 50,000-word novel on your blogs in only one month mdash; some with great success!

Therersquo;s also NaBloPoMo, which has nothing to do with post-modernism, but with blogging! It stands for National Blog Posting Month.

Itrsquo;s an even more fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you. And maybe the best part is that it starts whenever you want it to! The only objective is to post every day for a month. So why not begin with July? To make it official, sign up here. Itrsquo;s open to anyone with a blog, anywhere in the world.

The NaBloPoMo team provides a theme for each month, which isnrsquo;t mandatory, but is a nice way to gain inspiration that can kick off your daily updates.

Not into that? Then we suggest sticking to the stuff yoursquo;ve been blogging about all along mdash; the things you experience and love mdash; with the added caveat of keeping it on the regular.

If you run out of steam, you can always find ways to blog about the dozens of weird celebrations and holidays that take place in July, in addition to Independence Day in the U.S. mdash; like Ice Cream Soda Day, Video Games Day, or Bugs Bunnyrsquo;s Birthday.

To plug the WordPress community into your endeavor, we suggest using NaBloPoMo09 as a tag on each post you publish to your blog. Theyrsquo;ll show up on the tag results page, which is also a great place to get inspired by your fellow bloggers.

A note: Please refrain from commenting with questions about NaBloPoMo in response to this post. Itrsquo;s not a WordPress project. Instead, check out their FAQ to learn more about its objectives and requirements.

Happy (daily) blogging!

Last month we launched the Yahoo! App and 360 importer so you can migrate your content to WordPress.com quickly and easily. And we introduced the SocialVibe widget, which helps you earn donations for the charity of your choice. July will bring more feature updates, and more of the themes and customizations yoursquo;ve been asking for. Wersquo;re listening.

Here are the stats for June:

• 388,580 blogs were created.


• 5,845,417 posts were published.


• 411,540 new users joined.


• 5,800,941 file uploads.


• 3,633 gigabytes of new files.


• 810 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.


• 8,330,617 comments.


• 6,841,633 logins.


• 1,245,935,191 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,245,882,985 on self-hosted blogs (2,491,818,176 total across all WordPress blogs we track).


• 2,153,176 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.


• 1,447,021,840 words.

Plus:

You published 37,894 posts using the WordPress for iPhone app.

The new GigaOM Pro launched, powered by BuddyPress.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brasil, and WordCamp Dallas.

WordCamps coming up in July: WordCamp Montreal and WordCamp UK.

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 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;.