I’m glad to announce that my newest website, called WpVote, is online. What is it? That’s simple: WpVote is a 100% Wordpress focused social bookmarking site.

There’s a lot of social bookmarking sites. I know. But, have you ever managed to be on the Digg frontpage with a Wordpress focused article? Though it is possible, I didn’t see a lot of WP articles on Digg frontpage.

The fact is digg.com is now so big that only something like 1% of submitted articles can gain exposure and be on the frontpage.

On the other hand, the Wordpress community is growing everyday, and many people daily write hacks, articles or news, or creates themes, plugins and widgets. I thought that us, the Wordpress community, should have our very own social bookmarking website.

The “digg-like” website is in my opinion a good choice (even it is not original at all ) because everyone can promote their blog posts by contributing, and only the best submited articles will be promoted on the frontpage.

If you’re talking about Wordpress on your blog, or like to read interesting WP articles, you should join WpVote now!

I think it is safe to say that most (if not all) of our readers are big fans of WordPress.  The flexbility of WordPress is just incredible and still manages to impress me at times. What I didn’t realize is that many major corporations are starting to use WordPress to manage their blogs.

A recent post over at BloggingPro caught my attention because they cite a number of examples of WordPress being used by many online corporations, including:

• CNN
• Yahoo
• Sony
• The New York Times
• People
• eBay
• b5Media

That is quite the impressive list in my opinion and I think it goes to show just how easily WordPress can be integrated into all sorts of existing websites.  WordPress.org is definitely the most popular blogging software these days, but I think it is also competing well against CMS software like Joomla, Drupal, etc.

For those of you that have tried other software like Joomla or Drupal, how does WordPress stack up?

Yesterday I was excited to see a post pop up in my WordPress dashboard over on Mark Jaquith’s website announcing that WordPress has secured $29.5 million dollars in their second round of financing.   Congratulations to Automattic!  The investor this time is the New York Times so I think it is safe to say that they are doing something right.

While it may not seem like $29.5 million will go very far in today’s world, when you consider that they’ve gotten by on only $1.1 million since 2006, it somehow seems like a much bigger number.  

So what does this mean for WordPress?  It looks like Automattic currently has 17 employees.   If I was a betting man, I would bet the house that they will be hiring soon.   These employees can be used not only towards improving the WordPress software, but can also be applied towards improving the WordPress Codex, forums, or improving their efforts against fighting spam. 

Want to know more?  You can get more directly from Matt.

According to Ryan Boren, it looks like we can expect WordPress 2.4 to be delayed from its original due date. It was originally scheduled for December 12, 2007, but is now scheduled to be released on January 24th, 2008.

Reasons for the delay include the holidays and an upcoming baby (congrats Ryan!). According to Ryan:

With the holidays upon us, a new baby Boren coming next month, and a new admin design to implement, we’ve decided to push the release of WordPress 2.4 out to January 24th of next year. I updated the roadmap with the new date.

The WordPress team has promised that while version 2.3 focused a lot on the infrastructure of WordPress, version 2.4 will bring a lot of to the user interface and the user experience, as well as some speed improvements and caching changes.

In case you missed it, it looks like WP Themes Gallery has thrown together a collection of the top 40 WordPress blogs about WordPress. Included in the list are what WP Themes Gallery believes are the most significant WordPress blogs currently out there, based on various rankings. Their formula factors in Alexa ranking, Google PageRank, and the blog’s Technorati Ranking.

If you enjoy reading about WordPress, this is a great list to go down and make sure you are subscribing to a majority of these feeds.  There are a lot of sites that I love to read each day and many also offer some great resources for WordPress users.

Update: WP Themes Galary has released an update to their post which includes some additional WordPress blogs.  It looks like Hack WordPress is now ranked #32.   Not bad considering we’ve only been up and running for less than 40 days!

It wasn’t so long ago that Gravatar was all the rage around the blogosphere. Who wouldn’t want a globally recognized avatar? But problems with the service, combined with the emergence of the popular MyBlogLog avatar, seemed to have spelled the doom of Gravatar.

Now it looks like the service has been revived with Automattic’s recent acquisition of Gravatar. If anyone can turn this service into a success, it is the makers of WordPress. So what does this mean for Gravatar? And will the MyBlogLog avatar lose its popularity? Here is what Automattic has to say about their plans for the new service:

• We’re going to make all of the Premium features free, and refund anyone who bought them in the last 60 days.
• Move the gravatar serving to a Content Delivery Network so not only will they be fast, it’ll be low latency and not slow down a page load.
• Take the million or so avatars we have on WordPress.com and make them available through the Gravatar API, to compliment the 115k already here.
• From Gravatar, integrate them into all WordPress.com templates and bring features like multiple avatars over.
• From WordPress.com, bring the bigger sizes (128px) over and make that available for any Gravatar. Currently Gravatars are only available up to 80px.
• Allow Gravatar profile pages with Microformat support for things like XFN rel="me" and hCard.
• Develop a new API that has cleaner URLs and allows Gravatars to be addressed by things like URL in addition to (or instead of) email addresses.
• Rewrite the application itself (site.gravatar.com) to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid, for internet-scale performance and reliability.

It looks like the main beneficiaries of this plugin will be WordPress.com users, but I would expect to see the revival of Gravatar plugins appearing on WordPress.org blogs around the blogosphere once everything gets implemented.