“Tough note to communicate today: Automattic had a low-level (root) break-in to several of our servers, and potentially anything on those servers could have been revealed.

We have been diligently reviewing logs and records about the break-in to determine the extent of the information exposed, and re-securing avenues used to gain access. We presume our source code was exposed and copied. While much of our code is Open Source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited.”

WordPress.com parent company Automattic said that the investigation about the hackers is on-going. WordPress.com has about 18 million publishers and sees about 300 million unique visitors per month.

[TechCrunch]

The upgraded ($20 per year features) are:
- Protect your blog using two-step login process. A text message will be sent to your phone upon login with a passcode that must be entered to access the Dashboard
- SMS notifications of new comments and the ability to moderate them using a text message reply
- SMS notification when a new post is published to the blog
- Text message can be a new post

To get started, go to the “Text Messaging” section on the blog Dashboard and register your phone with the service. Activate the feature and select the text messaging features that you want to use for your blog.

[WordPress.com Blog]

[WordPress.com Blog]

If you click Reblog this Post, it takes you to QuickPress.  QuickPress contains the title and the beginning of the post you are reblogging.  The reblogging feature is very similar to what Tumblr and Posterous offers.

[WordPress.com Blog]

The deal was made this past July and now After The Deadline was made accessible for all WordPress.com users.  Automattic has around $30 million in funding and purchased the blo.gs pinging service from Yahoo! this past April.  Automattic also bought out PollDaddy in October and Intense Debate in September.

RSSCloud is a service that adds a cloud feature to RSS feeds. As soon as an author writes a blog post or news story, an update ping is sent to a cloud server. The cloud will determine whether that post is being subscribed to. If someone is subscribing to them, then the RSS aggregator is updated. This all happens within a second. The RSSCloud protocol was made by Dave Winer, the inventor of the original RSS specification.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress wrote about the changes on the company blog. “There’s only one reader so far (River2) that supports RSS cloud, but we expect there to be more in the future. We’re also going to be supporting other ways for people to get push notifications (Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter… who knows what else) so people will be able to find out about and visit your new blog posts as soon as possible, making blogging a more real-time experience. Since RSS Cloud is so easy to add to RSS, it seemed like a good place to start,” wrote Mullenweg

Some WordPress.org competitors include Blogger and TypePad.  WordPress.com competitors include Xanga and LiveJournal.   Automattic raised $1.1 million two years ago as well.  Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic stated that the funding would go towards building additional services.

The New York Times Company has been using the WordPress platform for their subsidiaries for quite some time.  About.com, a New York Times Company subsidiary is based on the WordPress platform.  And NYT has more than 50 blogs that are powered by WordPress as well.

WordPress also recently gave their users on WordPress.com a major step-up in terms of storage capacity.  WordPress users only had 50MB up until recently, but now they 3GB each.  Matt Mullenwag, founder of WordPress hopes that this increase in capacity will encourage their users to prdouce richer media.  Users who have paid for 1GB in the past will get 5GB instead of the free 3GB.

The announcement is also confirmed on Matt Mullenwag’s blog.