In a brief conversation with a commenter, Andy Peatling (Automattic’s Social Engineer and lead developer for BuddyPress) revealed WordPress’s plans to port the reblog feature over to WP.org fans.

WordPress.com is becoming a much more holistic and compelling platform. Andy…any plans for a plugin for WP.org folks? Even if it ties into a WP.com dashboard or blog it would still be great.

The gauntlet has been thrown to Posterous and Tumblr. (Tris Hussey)

The features are written to be extractable into WP.org plugins so I’ll be working to get those released in some form. (Andy Peatling)

Implementing reblog across the WordPress universe could be apart of Automattic’s overall strategy to thwart the rise of Tumblr as well as dethrone Blogger as the top weblog platform (WordPress currently comes in at number 2).

Currently several other platforms feature the reblog function including LiveJournal, Movabletype (through a plugin) as well as Typepad by Six Apart.

Automattic has not hinted at whether they will consider porting over their like feature as well, although self hosted WordPress fans can implement “likes” upon their blogs by installing Disqus upon their blogs (which fully supports Gravatars).

Skype was recently sold by eBay to a group of private investors and now those investors are looking to raise as much as $100 million with an initial public offering (IPO) which has been filed with the SEC.

It’s hard to tell what the price of shares will be for Skype stock, however some analysts have priced the company around the $2.75 billion market valuation point.

The company was purchased from eBay by a group of investors in September, those investors include: Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board. read more

It looks like the mobile blogging wars are about to heat up with Automattic (the company behind WordPress) announcing plans on upgrading all of their smartphone apps upon Android, Blackberry and (finally!) the iPhone.

Great news: We’re putting the finishing touches on the 2.6 release of WordPress for iOS! As if that wasn’t exciting enough, we’ve got even more good news.

First, we’re creating our own Beta Team for the WordPress for iOS project. Members of the Beta Team will be able to test releases before we submit them to the App Store and report back on their experiences. This will help us catch and fix bugs proactively, rather than having to publish bugfix releases after the fact. (Official iOS for WordPress Blog)

Automattic has also posted similar announcements upon their official Android and Blackberry blogs (the latter which should please WordPress fans planning on buying a Blackberry Torch smartphone in the near future).

Despite the fact that WordPress already dominates the blogging scene on the Blackberry as well as Android devices, the company has been surpassed by rivals like LiveJournal, who recently resurrected their iPhone app in a bid to challenge WordPress on the iDevice.

With more companies planning on launching official apps for Blackberry, iOS and Android (or updating the ones currently listed in the respective app stores), it will be interesting to see if WordPress can maintain its lead against challengers in the future.

(Image Credit: Norebbo)

Weebly has launched a new feature that may make WordPress and Blogspot fans jealous for a change.

Simply dubbed “ImagePerfect,” Weebly’s built in tool gives users the power to edit header images without the need to use a photo editor program like Paint.NET or Picasa (from Google).

Editing an image isn’t easy — even basic things like resizing, cropping, rotating and aligning your image perfectly can be frustrating to get right. You talked, we listened, and we’re excited to release the next step in Weebly’s ongoing improvement: Weebly ImagePerfect.

When you mouse over the header image on your site, you will now see an “Edit Image” button. When you click on this button, we’ll open up the ImagePerfect interface. (Official Weebly Blog) read more

With Automattic rolling out the like button across all WordPress.com blogs, many bloggers have been searching for a similar solution without having to embrace Facebook.

Fortunately it looks like Disqus has now officially rolled out their like feature to the masses which also fully supports Gravatars (a service by Automattic).

About a month ago, we (pre) announced a feature called Community Likes. Since then, there’s been a couple hundred early adopting communities testing this feature out (thank you!) and a few hundred thousand likes given. Today, this feature is going live on all sites using Disqus. [...]

Liking comments has been a core piece of Disqus since the beginning, and we’re now extending this feedback mechanism to the top-level page or article itself. Community Likes is an easy, quick way for your visitors to give feedback and make their presence known on your site, all without having to post an actual comment. (Official Disqus Blog) read more

After launching their switch to Posterous campaign, it looks like Posterous has encountered its first “speed bump” on the path towards success which unfortunately disabled the site for a brief amount of time.

Today, from 1:41pm until shortly before 3p pacific time, we had an unscheduled and unplanned outage due to a denial of service (DoS) attack on our core load-balancing servers. That basically means that we were flooded with malicious amounts traffic our upstream providers were unable to handle, and we couldn’t respond to the requests of real users. During this time, all Posterous-hosted sites were out.

Since that time, we have brought up a new load balancer on a new address to try to evade the attack. For most people who use a .posterous.com address for their site, this means that your site should be back up shortly, if it’s not already. However, if you use a custom domain for your Posterous site, you are still pointed to our old address, which remains under attack. (Official Posterous Blog)

While Posterous’s new address will help the site stay online, the company may want to investigate where this attack is coming from, as the DoS hackers could be targeting a few users who are speaking out against hostile regimes.

Hack attacks aside, Posterous is quickly gaining fame within the tech industry, having recently partnered with Pulse in an attempt to help make news more social.

Hopefully the Posterous crew can quickly find a way to thwart these childish attempts to silence their users, although for now its good to see that the platform is back online.

After copying Tumblr’s reblog feature earlier, it looks as if Automattic (the company behind WordPress) is copying yet another feature from the microblogging service.

Starting today you’ll notice a new feature at the bottom of all WordPress.com blog posts. We’ve enabled a “Like” button, which, when clicked, shows a Gravatar image for all the bloggers who like a post.

When you “like” a post two core things happen. First, the blog post’s author sees your “like” and can click-through to your Gravatar profile. Second, clicking “like” saves the post in your homepage dashboard (in the “Posts I Like” section), so you can share it with others, or just keep it around for future reference. (Official WordPress Blog)

Currently the only difference between WordPress’s like feature and Tumblr’s is the fact that the former uses a star as an icon while the latter uses a heart symbol.

While the like feature does make WordPress much more social, it does make one wonder whether Automattic and Tumblr are stealing each other’s ideas (as the latter copied Automattic’s mass post editing feature in June).

Thus far this feature is only available to WP.com users, although self hosting WordPress fans can mimic the “like” feature by using the Facebook like button.

David Fishman is a blogger and food enthusiast who likes to cook and blog about how to make sushi at his website, How to Make Sushi At Home.

You’ll notice that I’ve found a clever way to work this into the first paragraph of my guest blog post. That wasn’t the purpose of relating it to you right now though, so give me a chance and keep reading.

It’s the juxtaposition of blogging and sushi preparation that I’d like to talk about, because indeed, they are listed together in my author section, and indeed, they have a number of interesting parallels inherent in their existence. Let’s talk for a little bit about why making sushi is actually exactly like making a blog. For those of you with blogs out there, I hope you’ll be convinced to start making sushi (hey I have a great place for you to learn *hint hint*). For those of you who make sushi, maybe you’ll be inspired to start blogging. read more

The boys and girls at Automattic (the company behind WordPress) have released a new feature for Intense Debate that empowers readers to help blog admins squash spammers, trolls and aggressive commenters trying to hijack your threads.

We released a cool new setting for reported comments (comments that your readers flag as inappropriate). You can now opt to have the comments automatically put into moderation for review. This handy option can help you and your readers keep your comments clean and debates friendly. [...]

While you’re there you can also take advantage of our Auto-Delete setting for reported comments. With the Auto-Delete option, you can set a maximum number of times that a comment is reported before the comment is deleted. This is another super-handy feature for crowdsourcing moderation. (Official IntenseDebate Blog)

Aside from making comments more social, IntenseDebate’s community approach should help blog admins save time in identifying spam (especially with human spammers finding innovative ways to “pass” as legit commenters).

IntenseDebate may also help curb the overall rise in spam, which seems to have escalated to new heights thanks in part to the recession (not to mention SEO commenters with big egos).

Despite being acquired by Automattic in 2008, IntenseDebate continues to support various platforms beyond WordPress including Blogger, Tumblr, Typepad and Movabletype.