The latest item on Automattic’s shopping list is PollDaddy, the hosted poll solution that apparently have served 195 million votes over some 1 million polls to date. The two man operation have joined Automattic, and PollDaddy polls are now hosted in the new owner’s powerful datacenter. Good for the stability of the service.

Matt Mullenweg explains why Automattic acquired PollDaddy:

As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.

PollDaddy is now a part of the WordPress.com service, detailed here, and also available in a plugin for hosted WordPress installs. That adds to the current support of embedding polls, something that won’t change. read more

Automattic has announced that it has acquired IntenseDebate for an undisclosed sum. This should ensure that, in time, the free blog commenting service has the potential to find its way onto both hosted and self-managed WordPress blogs - over four million at present.

According to a CNet article, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg has said that IntenseDebate software could become the default commenting option on both WordPress.org and WordPress.com, citing email replies and comment rating system as the two of the main reasons for taking on the service. read more

Giga Omni Media recently bought jkOnTheRun, and now they’re spending some more money in the blogosphere, adding none other than The Apple Blog to their network. This is another great call, in my opinion, since The Apple Blog has a nice voice and is a great source of Apple news. In fact, it has been in my feed reader since before I even got my Mac, and that says a lot. Owner Josh Pigford says this in an announcement post:

I’m honored for The Apple Blog to be a part of such a solid group of publications, and really look forward to where The Apple Blog will go in the coming months and years. I’ll be staying on board with the transition as will a number of our great contributors.

He also promises that there won’t be any radical changes, just more of everything, which is nice. read more

It appears as if Google have bought TNC (site in Korean), short for Tatter and Company, which is a Korean company focusing on blogs. VentureBeat reports that TNC is providing professional blogging software and services to more to 400,000 users, and also says that the sum Google paid for the company is undisclosed. No official word from Google yet.

However, TNC founder Chang Kim blogs about it over at Web 2.0 Asia (in English, thankfully, for those of us that don’t speak or read Korean), which gives quite some legitimacy to the claim. read more