ReadWriteWeb

After recent comScore data showed Twitter stats leveling off as WordPress traffic continued to grow, some bloggers framed the results as an either/or proposition; if one platforms wins, the other loses.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has weighed in on the subject, stating that the interaction between microblogging and what he's calling "megablogging" is hardly a zero-sum game. "It's not really a 'versus,' it's an 'and'," he wrote.

Once the service for those serious enough to pay for the privilege to post, TypePad recently released a free "Micro" service. The company made the decision to offer a free product realizing the demand for a platform more formal than Twitter and less formal than Wordpress or Typepad's original product. ReadWriteWeb compared TypePad's Micro against 2 other leading light blogging tools. Below are our thoughts:

When you launch a make or break initiative like Windows Azure, you better get it right.

Well, from our vantage point, Microsoft got it right. How? In front of a sea of developers at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft trotted out a group of geek all-stars who showed how they are using Azure to do some pretty cool stuff.

The new version of Wordpress for iPhone just arrived in the App Store (iTunes link). While the first version was already quite usable, this update brings a number of new features and usability enhancements to the Wordpress experience on the iPhone. The new interface makes it easier to switch between comments, posts and pages. The comments interface now also displays Gravatars. Throughout the app, the Wordpress team has tweaked the interface and it's now easier to manage your blog from the iPhone.

Matt Mullenweg has just annouced on his blog that WordPress parent company Automattic is open sourcing After the Deadline, a natural-language spell-checking plugin for WordPress and TinyMCE that was only recently ushered into the Automattic fold.

Scarcely seven weeks after its acquisition was announced, After the Deadline's core technology is being released under the GPL. Moreover, writes Mullenweg, "There's also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any text area."

The millions of blogs on WordPress.com will now have a clean mobile theme turned on by default, removing most of the formatting and making the sites easy to load on a phone. WordPress bloggers may want to opt-out of the new setting; not everyone likes how the first mobile themes selected by WordPress look.

As we wrote earlier today though, consumers are not happy with how the mobile web is performing. Turning on mobile themes by default could be one small step towards solving that problem in the large territory that is WordPress.

WordPress.com just announced that its users can now use the service's Publicize feature to automatically send out a tweet whenever they post a new story. Wordpress's Publicize feature, which was only unveiled one week ago, already supported sending updates to Yahoo profiles via the Yahoo Updates service. WordPress uses Twitter's OAuth mechanism to connect to Twitter. The Twitter updates can be customized and will use Wordpress' wp.me URL shortener.

The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit is fast approaching! We hope you'll register to join us at this exciting day-long event filled with participatory conversations among the leading innovators in real-time technology, media and financial services.

If you can't make it to Mountain View, California in eight days, get ready to watch selected sessions streamed live online (thanks to Justin.tv). This isn't going to be talking-heads pushing their products on stage, this is going to be a high-value brainstorming, networking and collaborative learning. Check out the companies below; they are bringing financial support to this important gathering to talk together about the future of the internet.

Early this morning PicApp announced a partnership with Automattic and integration with WordPress. More than 7.5 million publishers on WordPress' hosted service will gain access to 20 million stock images from services like Getty, Corbis and Jupiter Images. The one caveat with these images is that there is advertising embedded in them. While the blogosphere continues to debate the depth of image content, the true significance of the announcement is rooted in the fact that a new era of collaboration is upon us.

Two years ago Danah Boyd's article "Viewing
American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace" mesmerized marketers and tech journalists. Facebook was described as "hegemonic" while MySpace was the haven of "subaltern" teens. Whether Boyd intended it or not, Facebook became characterized as the privileged space of college kids and MySpace was plagued with the perception of lowbrow tackiness. At the time it made sense that a site for the privileged had less traffic. After all, isn't privilege generally exclusive? According to a recent Hitwise blog post Facebook is not only beating MySpace's traffic, it's the second ranked site overall in the US behind Google.