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WordPress has revamped the WordPress.com Comments panel in Site Stats to give blog authors better insight into their most responsive readers. In addition to a summary of recent comments, the panel now displays leader boards for top commenters and most commented posts. For quieter blogs, the leader boards show all-time stats, but for active blogs, they cover the last three months of activity.

The blog provider has also announced two new third-party apps for WordPress.com blogs to make them more social and shareable. Feedfabrik now allows WordPress.com users to turn their blogs into books, both in PDF and physical formats (and there's currently a 10% discount offer). Empire Avenue, the free "Social Stock Market" game, has also announced WordPress integration, allowing WordPress bloggers to incorporate their blogging influence into their share price.

Static sites have better performance than dynamic sites, but you lose a lot of features by giving up a content management system (CMS), right? Maybe not, if you have a framework like Octopress.

Last week I looked at static sites and cloud services, but even Todd Hoff's excellent coverage put me off a bit. Then I ran into the Octopress 2.0 announcement.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has given his 2011 State of the Word address, and the state of the word is strong. Nearly 15% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress, up from 8.5% last year. For every 100 new active domains in the U.S., 22 of them run the popular open-source blogging software.

Mullenweg's address at the WordCamp conference in San Francisco this week goes through the history of the WordPress user interface, showing how its features developed over time and were then pared down to today's minimal, efficient design. With its frequent adjustments to UI and its healthy market for ready-made and custom themes and plug-ins, WordPress' user friendliness is key to its broad and rapid adoption by content creators. But this year, WordPress conducted its first user and developer survey, receiving over 18,000 responses, and it found a thriving economy for developers and site administrators as well.

Putting social media on autopilot is very seductive, but is it a good idea?

Blog publishing platform WordPress announced this afternoon that its users can now automatically cross-post links to their new blog posts to a Facebook page. Previously, the feature only allowed publishing onto a Facebook account's Wall. Pages are where organizations are supposed to communicate with a large number of interested parties.

WordPress.com's Scott Berkun said that this was one of the features most requested by users. The new feature is fast and easy - but is it something that publishers ought to use? Experience and study of the results of this kind of automation don't always make it look so good.

Every time I look at the visitor statistics for my blog, I'm amazed at the plethora of ways that people consume the content I create. Apart from the people who merely read my posts within a third-party feed reader, I have site visitors that are viewing on mobile devices of varying formats, users coming from different locations and a host of different variables.

By now you know that using social media is an essential part of running any-sized business, but how do you take those first baby steps towards learning about various services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others? The mailing list provider Constant Contact has put together an excellent site called the Social Media Quickstarter here that is chock full of tutorials and step-by-step directions, along with blog entries on best practices, suggestions, a few podcasts, and other instructional materials.

Today the community behind open source blogging platform, WordPress, released its latest version: 3.2. It features a design refresh and speed improvements. That's all par for the course for a software update these days. What actually caught my attention was a slightly gimmicky thing called Distraction Free Writing (or DFW). As the name suggests, what this does is remove all distractions from your computer screen... so all you see is the words that you are typing. The WordPress community has nicknamed this a "zen mode."

Over the past week, we at ReadWriteWeb have been obsessed with a new social networking toy called Google Plus. Some of our team think it may even be better than Twitter and Facebook. Personally, I haven't caught the Plus bug yet, and in many ways I'm resisting precisely because I want less social media distractions, not more. Indeed, I think we need more zen on the Web and less plus!

Brazilian blogger murdered. 36-year-old Brazilian blogger Ednaldo Figueira was shot down in the streets of his home town, Serra do Mel.

After receiving death threats, Figueira was shot six times on June 15 by gunmen on motorcycles outside his workplace. In addition to being a blogger, he was a newspaper editor and an official in a trade union. This is the second time a blogger has been murdered by his government or, in Figueira's case most likely organized crime figures attached to the government.

Visitors to WordPress.com blogs will now be able to sign in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts in order to leave comments. This is in addition, of course, to being able to comment anonymously (as a "Guest") or as a WordPress user.

The new feature is intended to give users the flexibility to decide which identity they want to utilize for comments, even if they're logged in to WordPress via multiple accounts. You can, for example, be logged in via Facebook or WordPress but decide to leave your comments under your Twitter profile.

The new version of the WordPress.com dashboard no longer supports Internet Explorer 6. "It has required increasingly complex code trickery to make the WordPress dashboard work in the IE6 browser, which was introduced 10 years ago and does not support current web standards.," WordPress UX Lead Jane Wells wrote in an announcement this week.

The beta release of WordPress 3.2 does not support IE6 either.